From Orality to Open: Innovations in Multimedia Monograph Publishing in the Humanities

This article shares the story of the purpose and methods of the World Oral Literature series, an open access monograph series supported, hosted, and published by Open Book Publishers. The publication series emerged as a response to the increasingly problematic nature of certain sectors of academic monograph publishing in which production costs are kept low by exploiting free or subsidized labour by scholars, while profits are kept high and public access heavily restricted. In a move to counter this process, the fully open access World Oral Literature series was established to preserve and promote the dissemination of endangered oral literatures in innovative, ethical, and culturally-appropriate ways.