With the turning of the calendar over to another year, a new subset of canonical (and more obscure!) titles have become available via the Public Domain. Some of the more well known titles entering the public domain this year are Ernest Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms, William Faulkner’s The Sound and The Fury, and Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. These three titles were all published in 1929, meaning their 95 year copyright term expired at the drop of midnight on January 1st, 2025.
Additionally, joining some original Mickey Mouse and Winnie the Pooh character sketches that have in the past couple of years entered the public domain – everyone’s favorite spinach-can popping, bicep-flexing sailor, Popeye, will join the public domain as well. And, just as his predecessors before him, it appears he is slated to appear in a number of horror films which have done well to turn classical children’s characters into something else entirely.
Beyond classic children’s characters and classical works of literature, this year the public domain marks a rather large shift in cinema. While the transition had largely already been made, and indeed, some “talkies” hit the public domain last year, having come out in 1928, it wasn’t until one year later, 1929, that these “talkies” took over as the preeminent form of motion pictures. Alfred Hitchcock’s first synchronized sound film, Blackmail, was released in 1929 and has thus entered the public domain this year. Additionally, Hallelujah, which is the first Hollywood film with an entirely black cast, in now in the public domain as well.
Completing a dissertation is a significant milestone, and ensuring its proper submission is equally important. The Libraries’ eTD@BC workshops are designed to guide graduate students through the thesis or dissertation submission process. By planning ahead, you can save valuable time when you need it most – at the end. This spring, we’re offering three sessions, one in-person and two virtual, that cover the same essential information.
Dates:
Wednesday, February 12, noon – 12:45 pm, on Zoom.
Tuesday, February 18, 6:30 – 7:15 pm, on Zoom.
Thursday, February 20, noon – 12:45 pm, O’Neill Library 307.
To register, go to https://libcal.bc.edu/calendar/workshops. Upon registration for an online workshop, you will receive a confirmation email with the Zoom link.
Topics to be covered in this workshop include:
The submission website, including a walk-through of the submission process
Important decisions and issues, such as eScholarship@BC, embargoes, copyright, etc.
How to ensure that a published eTD can be discovered and accessed by others
Where to get additional help
Graduate students can contact etd-support@bc.edu with any questions about the workshops.
More and more across academia, students getting involved with scholarly publishing on their campuses. Whether this takes the form of contributing to research papers or authoring articles and submitting them to journals, young scholars are seeking opportunities to participating in developing discourse and add to the scholarly record. Boston College libraries in particular supports this in a variety of ways; all students are welcome to apply for funding via the Open Access Publishing Fund, which provides support with the coverage of Article Processing Charges for authors interested in submitting work to, and our Open Journal Systems platform, which currently hosts nine student journals publishing material.
Given the relative increased interest, the timing of this new title could not have been better. How to Edit and Manage a Successful Scholarly Journal: Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences was publishing in May of 2024 and consists of eighteen chapters covering a wide variety of central topics that any young scholar should keep in mind. From best practices around building an editorial team to how to judge questionable and predatory editorial behaviors, this helpful guide provides a foundation for higher education practitioners interested in guiding students through the process of being published or attempting to manage a serial. And indeed, the ebook is now fully accessible for rental through the Boston College libraries’ catalogue.
While there are eighteen chapters in the collection that cover a wide range of topics geared towards helping scholars think about publishing in the humanities, arts, and social sciences, Chapter 8 “Rebound and renewal: strategies and tactics for journal revitalisation” focuses on some ideas for picking up journals that may struggle to consistent gather and publish content on a quarterly or yearly basis. The chapter outlines best practices around communications with an editorial board and some suggested leadership roles, and also discusses ideas for attracting submissions, such as publishing “special issues” with a clearly defined focus – inviting a wider array of reviewers for a more non-committal approach to introduce young scholars to participating in scholarly publishing. Additionally, sticking to consistent timelines for the review process leads to more consistent positive relationships with authors, which can help provide sources of content when a journal is looking for submissions.
Here at Boston College, we have a number of journals that still enjoy tremendous global readership, but are no longer publishing current issues. Elementsis a interdisciplinary undergraduate journal with a long history of publication at Boston College, but is currently not actively seeking submissions. Additionally, Lingua Frankly, another long time student publication, explores undergraduate work that has to do with language or linguistics, but has not had an active editorial board since the major disruptions of the pandemic. If you have interest in revitalizing or starting your own an open access journal at Boston College, please reach out to Gabriel Feldstein and the Scholarly Communications Team for more information. Click the images below to view the publications from the respective student journals.
Elements has been in publication since 2005 and has published 28 issues with Boston College Libraries.Lingua Frankly, Boston College’s undergraduate linguistics journal, has published 4 volumes starting in 2013.
The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) has received funding from Congress to continue its implementation of the Nelson Memo. This memo requires any federal agency that awards research grants to implement a policy requiring immediate public access to publications resulting from that research, as well as access to data and the use of persistent digital identifiers in article metadata.
During the lengthy Federal appropriations process, the House Appropriations Committee released a bill that specifically defunded any attempt to implement the memo. No individual or lobbying group ever came forward to take any credit for trying to kill the OSTP memo in the budget, nor was there much explanation of why it might have been included.
The final appropriation bill (technically the explanatory statement accompanying the bill) only included a requirement that OSTP produce a financial analysis of the impact of the memo, “including the policy’s anticipated impact on Federal research investments, research integrity, and the peer review process,” within 100 days of the bill passing. In other positive news, this was the only requirement. There is no trigger stopping development of policy depending on what the report says. This likely means that after the report, there would be a round of Congressional hearings before more action is taken. Being an election year, there may not be enough time for a truly adverse legislative action. Overall, this means plans will progress, and there should be some good reading on the state of scholarly publishing sometime in mid-June!
Earlier this year, the Coalition for Diversity and Inclusion in Scholarly Communication (C4DISC) held their first community meeting. The main mission of the coalition is “to work with organizations and individuals to build equity, inclusion, diversity, and accessibility in scholarly communication.” The coalition officially launched in 2020 – and January’s meeting was in fact the coalition’s very first community meeting. Among its members and partners, the coalition boasts Crossref, the Library Publishing Coalition, the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association, and more. As the push for more equitable models of publishing continues to be at the forefront of the minds of scholars and librarians, best practices around diversity, inclusion, and accessibility will lay a key foundation in assuring that scholarly publishing is not only published and consumed by the most privileged layers of our society.
To provide some context as the meeting started, coalition members presented on some of the priorities and outcomes from the past year – including toolkits and surveys developed by the coalition as a means of getting librarians and scholarly publishing practitioners thinking about their own roles in creating a more diverse scholarly record. Thee were also tools to help proactively change the culture around scholarly publishing so that marginalized voices can be centered, rather than continually obscured.
As the coalition continues to hold larger community meetings and launches its communities of practice, librarians and practitioners can start to think about best practices for ensuring diverse, equitable, and inclusive academic publishing that highlights marginalized voices and works as seminal parts of a collection or publishing portfolio.
Toolkits
As a means of providing helpful ways for institutions to build more equitable diverse models for themselves, the Coalition provides links to toolkits that have been put together by leaders in publishing and higher education.
In addition to the Toolkits above, the coalition is also currently working on an Equity on Editorial Boards toolkit – a resource that will aim to assist journal and editorial managers in figuring out the best ways to ensure an attitude and editorial board that reflects a global population.
Surveys
In addition to the toolkits, the Coalition also provides links to the 2018 and 2023 Workplace Equity Surveys. While the results and analysis from the 2023 is still being published, an article from Learned Publishing gets into some of the details from the 2018 survey.
