What experimental publishing does
Experimental publishing, due to its ever-evolving nature, is hard to pin down, defying clear definitions. Instead of focusing on what experimental publishing is, it therefore makes more sense to explore what it does and how it fulfils the needs of scholars and publishers to accommodate different types and forms of research. Experimental publishing can open up scholarship further, taking advantage of the opportunities afforded by more libre forms of openness to explore increased engagement and interaction with (and reuse of) open access book content, while offering authors alternative ways to articulate complex longform arguments. It includes experiments with publishing formats (from shorter books such as minigraphs to forms of processual or versioned publishing) in response to the legacy and limitations of more conventional formats, and with digital multimodal publications, which embed and communicate research through multimedia content (from video, sound, and images to comics and animations).
Collaborative scholarship
Experimental publishing also makes systemic interventions, questioning how scholarship is produced, shared, and consumed. This includes experiments with more collaborative and interactive forms of knowledge production, which extend (and critique) ideas of individual authorship and prestige by exploring forms of collaborative, distributed, and anonymous authorship. This also involves giving recognition to the many contributors involved in knowledge production: from editors, designers, and developers to the important material agency of the media, tools, infrastructures, and platforms used to communicate longform research, emphasising their political and socio-technical nature.
Equitable interaction
Experimental publishing can be seen as part of a larger effort to make publishing more inclusive and equitable, to explore how the digital medium can be used to engage audiences in and beyond the academy, for example through forms of open, community, and post-publication peer review and citizen humanities, and through experiments with new forms of licensing that allow reuse, remix, and adaptations of research (including protocols that outline more equitable forms of engagement with community and indigenous knowledge). Some of the more common kinds of interaction that open books afford include annotating, open peer review, remix and reuse, social scholarship, and various emergent practices (including versioning and computational publishing), all practices that enable the creation of communities and conversations around books. These practices, alongside examples of tools and platforms that support them and books that have been created as a result of them, are outlined more in depth in Copim’s Experimental Publishing Compendium.
Critique of legacy systems
Experimental publishing can also take a strong activist stance, critiquing the hegemonic systems that buttress scholarly communication – including the dominance of commercial monopolistic publishing companies and how these promote a system shaped by and accommodating mainly publishers, academic institutions, and scholars in the Global North. A system organised in a linear way around the publication of fixed, closed, and copyrighted commodities (the book, the article, the journal), and supporting Western epistemologies and value systems, including liberal humanist (i.e. individual, proprietary) authorship functions. Experimental and multimodal books – often iterative and non-linear – question these relationalities and demand a rethinking of publishing and editorial workflows and the roles played by different stakeholders (publishers, authors, developers) within them.
New models, practices, and imaginaries
Beyond a critique, experimental books also provide imaginaries for new and alternative ways to communicate research findings and to create communities around them. This includes reimagining and re-performing the relationalities that constitute research and publishing (what they are for and how they are currently organised to support the needs of specific stakeholders), experimenting with publishing formats and relations that are more equitable and better suit the rich diversity of humanities research while supporting the conversations and interactions around it.
How to get started with experimental publishing
If you are interested in experimenting with the form or concept of your next book, one way to start is by thinking in more depth how it can be best communicated and shared. Why are you publishing this book, which communities would you like to reach out to, collaborate or interact with, and what format(s) would be best to reach them? Get in touch with a press that is open to book experiments: small and scholar-led presses have often stood at the forefront of experimental publishing (e.g. Open Humanities Press, the presses in the ScholarLed collective) as have several university presses in the US (e.g. University of Michigan Press, Stanford University Press, University of Minnesota Press, MIT Press), many of which have benefitted from Mellon funding in support of experimental and multimodal publishing. Do also check out the references and readings listed below and have a look at the Experimental Publishing Compendium to explore tools, practices, and examples of experimental books.