Palgrave Macmillan has published its first open access Palgrave Pivot title, Seeing Ourselves Through Technology: How We Use Selfies, Blogs and Wearable Devices to See and Shape Ourselves under a CC BY license.
Palgrave Pivot is a digital-first, mid-length research format which offers rapid publication and is more flexible than traditional academic publications. Titles are between 25,000 and 50,000 words – longer than a journal article, but shorter than a monograph – and are published within 12 weeks of acceptance post peer review. This book was published within five weeks of acceptance. In the two years since launch, 315 Palgrave Pivot titles have been published.
Iain Hrynaszkiewicz, Head of Data and HSS Publishing in Palgrave Macmillan’s Open Research division, said: “The Palgrave Pivot format has been breaking boundaries in scholarly publishing for more than two years now. We are pleased Seeing Ourselves Through Technology – a title of wide interest to researchers, technologists and the public alike – has been liberated from the traditional print-based form. The Creative Commons Attribution License, CC BY, means anyone can both read and reuse this timely content.”
Seeing Ourselves Through Technology examines the ways in which we understand ourselves through selfies, blogs and lifelogging. Rettberg analyses how these forms intertwine with our long histories of written, visual and quantitative modes of self-representations. The book uses examples to explore the balance between using technology to see ourselves and allowing our machines to tell us who we are. Rettberg explores topics such as the meaning of Instagram filters, smartphone apps that write your diary for you, and the ways in which governments and commercial entities create their own representations of us from the digital traces we leave behind as we go through our lives.
The book is published through a CC BY license, the most permissive open access license, meaning that readers can alter, transform, or build upon the content and then distribute the resulting work as long as the original work is correctly cited. This was the first book to be funded by the University of Bergen’s Publication Fund for Open Access, and is available to download for free from retailers such as Amazon Kindle. Print on demand copies are also available.
Palgrave Macmillan has also published two open access monographs through Palgrave Open: Fungal Disease in Britain and the United States 1850-2000 (11th November 2014) and Multiculturalism and Conflict Reconciliation in the Asia Pacific (12th September 2014).
