It’s International Open Access Week, when the academic and research communities recognize the Open Access (OA) movement’s impact on knowledge sharing across the globe. Penn Press has a growing OA program in journals and is the publisher of three open-access journals: Observational Studies; Pasados: Recovering History, Imagining Latinidad (coming in 2024); and the Journal of Disaster Studies (coming in 2023).
For OA Week, we interviewed editors José Aranda, John Alba Cutler, Carmen Lamas, and Yolanda Padilla about their plans for Pasados. An initiative of Recovery: Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage, the journal centers scholarship that helps us think historically about Latinx peoples and cultures and publishes methodological and theoretical studies of Latinx archives, textual artifacts, and histories.
Why did you choose the Open Access business model for your journal?
Open Access was always part of the plan. Making scholarship, histories, primary texts, culture and biographies that represent a Latinx past before 1980 widely available has always been a principle of the Recovery Project.
What was a motivating factor in starting the journal?
The desire to have a journal platform for the Recovery Project is at least twenty years old, maybe from the beginning. It’s finally because of a critical mass of scholars, the willingness of University of Pennsylvania Press to support open access journals, and a sense of history that now is the time to make this journal a reality.
Can you tell us about what kind of colleagues you hope to have as part of your journal’s board and why?
The board represents individuals who have been active in Recovery scholarship for years, some for decades. They bring not only their expertise as scholars, but also their varied institutional experiences in universities from across the country. Their combined intellectual and cultural capital will enable a successful launch of this new journal.
For more information, visit the Pasados website. To submit, visit the Pasados author site.
