2021 in Review

by the Feeding the Elephant Editorial Collective

As 2021 comes to a close, the Elephant Collective is reflecting on the many conversations we’ve had with the scholars, librarians, and publishers who contributed to this forum in 2021. We heard about the struggle to earn a livable wage, manage remote work, conceptualize what it means to present at an online conference, and represent community voices in the peer review and publications process. We learned about collaborations that are advancing open access and innovative digital formats, picked apart the costs of scholarly monographs and how publishers are managing to balance their budgets, and what we can all do to build solidarity within the scholarly communications ecosystem to make sure it continues to survive and thrive.

As we’ve been reflecting, we collected the year’s posts by category for easy browsing and sharing. And we hope you will share these posts with your colleagues and students and start conversations in your own scholarly communications networks. If there are topics you’d like to see covered on the forum or if you have something you’d like to write about, pitch us! To receive our weekly posts, subscribe to the Book Channel on the H-Net Commons or on Twitter and follow the hashtag #FeedingTheElephant. For now, we are taking a break and look forward to picking up the conversations in 2022!

Feeding the Elephant 2021 at a Glance

1) Writerly and Publishing Advice

• Jenny Tan, The Problem with "I Argue that...", July 28, 2021.
• Victoria Smolkin, On Translation, November 3, 2021.
• Dawn Durante, #PeerReviewSyllabus, September 22, 2021.
• Amanda Frost and Anastasia Wraight, Working with Your Editor: What to Expect When Your Book Is in Copyediting, March 10, 2021.
• Julia Cook, Mary Lui, Kelly Finefrock, Amanda Krause, and Laura Furney, Are My Images Good Enough to Print? Some Tips for Authors, May 12, 2021.
• Megan Kate Nelson, The Book Writing is Done! Now the Promotion Begins, February 3, 2021.
• Kathleen O'Brien-Nicholson, Ask UP: Authors Seeking Knowledge from University Presses, March 3, 2021.

2) Workplace Issues

• Amy Sherman, Pay in Scholarly Publishing, August 18, 2021.
• Becca Bostock and Dominique J. Moore, Show Me the Money: Talking about Dollars in a Way that Makes More Sense, August 25, 2021.
• Rachael Levay, Remote Work Works, September 8, 2021.

3) Economics of Publishing

• Catherine Cocks, Why Is My Book So Expensive? The Cost of a Scholarly Monograph, February 10, 2021.
• Stephen Shapiro, Doth Academic Publishing Never Prosper?, December 1, 2021.

4) Innovations in Open Access & Scholarly Communications

• Catherine Cocks, Taking Stock of Open Access Book Publishing, November 17, 2021.
• Catherine Cocks, Going Digital: Considerations and Collaborations, October 13, 2021.
• Yelena Kalinsky, Online Conferences, Intellectual Property, and the Changing Shape of Scholarly Communications, March 24, 2021.
• Catherine Cocks, Publishing Public Humanities Projects: A Conversation, July 14, 2021.

5) Collaboration within the Scholarly Communications Ecosystem

• Barry Goldenberg and Dave Tell, Appreciating the Messy Process of the Public Humanities, February 25, 2021.
• Sara Jo Coen and Anne Cong-Huyen, Born-Digital Publications: A Conversation between a Librarian and a Publisher, parts 1 and 2, April 7 and 14, 2021.
• Rachel Fleming-May, The Library, The Academy, and Scholarly Communications, August 11, 2021.
• Sharon Ince and Christopher Hoadley, Working with Your Librarian: Advice and Resources for Doctoral Students, April 28, 2021.
• Katie Lee and Jennifer Nelson, Relationship Building for More Equitable Publishing, October 6, 2021.
• Samuel Cohen and Rebecca Colesworthy, How to (Build Solidarity with University Presses So They Exist to) Publish Your Book: A Roundtable, March 31, 2021.

6) Scholarly Communications in a Wider Lens

• Dawn Durante, [1:3] The Value of Popular Culture, June 16, 2021.
• Yelena Kalinsky, Historical Perspectives on Scholarly Communications: Tamizdat Then and Now, October 20, 2021.

7) And finally, all of the Elephant Roundups in one convenient place!

Have something to say on this topic? Reply to this post or email the Elephant about writing for us. We welcome submissions from stakeholders on all sides of scholarly publishing.