GigaByte: Publishing at the Speed of Research

Current practices in scientific publishing are unsuitable for rapidly changing fields and for presenting updatable data sets and software tools. In this regard, and as part of the need to push scientific publishing to match the needs of modern research, we would like to announce the upcoming launch of GigaByte, an online open-access, open data journal that aims to be a new way to publish research following the software paradigm: CODE, RELEASE, FORK, UPDATE and REPEAT. Following on the success of GigaScience in promoting data sharing and reproducibility of research, its new sister, GigaByte, will aim to take this even further. With a focus on short articles, using a questionnaire-style review process, and combining that with the custom built publishing infrastructure from River Valley Technologies, we now have a cutting edge, XML-first publishing platform designed specifically to make the entire publication process easier, quicker, more interactive, and better suited to the speed needed to communicate modern research.

Modernist Fiction/Alternative Modernisms

This chapter examines the history of modernist fiction in Australia, New Zealand, and Canada within the larger context of geomodernist scholarship. It first considers how modernism relates to modernity and modernization before discussing cultural nationalism and the debate between the ‘native’ and the ‘cosmopolitan’. It then analyses boundary-troubling between realism and modernism, James Joyce's influence on fiction writers, and the works of Indigenous writers that force a reconsideration of modernism. It also explores the publishing infrastructure of modernist fiction production as well as the dialectical move between imitation and subversion as seen in Australian, New Zealand, and Canadian literatures. Finally, it provides additional contexts through which to understand how material conditions such as the availability of publication outlets shape the ways in which literary movements develop and gather momentum.

Rwandan Fiction

This chapter provides a detailed context to the state of Rwanda’s literary and publishing infrastructure, as well as the economic, political and linguistic challenges that hinder its continued development. In particular, the lack of accessibility that Rwandans had to fiction and publications prior to the early 2000s, and how this has had an effect on the fiction produced about the genocide. As a result of the large number of factors that hinder the production and distribution of genocide fiction by Rwandan authors, this chapter analyses the skewed perception of the genocide in the West, and how Rwandan literature is presented to the Anglophone world.

Designing Digital Infrastructure: Four Considerations for Scholarly Publishing Projects

As we move discussions around publishing forward and adopt open-access models, social scientists need to consider how digital infrastructure opens and closes possibilities for scholarly production and engagement. Attention to changes in publishing infrastructure—which, like most infrastructure, is often rendered invisible—is needed, not only because it allows us to make sense of socio-technical transitions at various scales and for differently invested communities, but because we need more informed participants, users who can question the system in ways that make it more robust. This essay suggests that digital infrastructure design and development should be organized around (1) platform affordances, (2) support for labor, (3) emerging circulation practices, and (4) opportunities for collaboration. By tracing the long-term socio-technical work that made it possible for Cultural Anthropology to go open access earlier this year, this essay works to make visible some behind-the-scenes details to be considered when thinking about the future of scholarly publishing.

On the Publishing Infrastructure of the University and its Construction Principles

The basic principles of publishing activities in universities and their interrelation, all stages of redaction, the problems each of them, and ways to solve them. The activities of the distribution sector of publishing in the structure of the Research Library of Chelyabinsk State Academy of Culture and Arts and the history of its creation are described.