The Open Arts Journal

Aims & Scope

The Open Arts Journal addresses the demand for a rigorously compiled, peer-reviewed platform for arts scholarship open to diverse participants. Our dissemination is global, spanning multiple communities including practitioners and historians of art, architecture and design, curators and arts policy-makers, and researchers in the arts and heritage sectors. Open Arts Journal emphasises innovation, in content and medium and by virtue of a bespoke digital design. Our contributors encompass a wide range of scholars, from professionals to provocateurs, with original visual essays and polemics; reflections on art from curators, historians and artists; and the fruits of rigorous theoretical, historical or longitudinal research. The Open Arts Journal is above all a tactical initiative. It confronts the mixed blessings brought to the arts and humanities by current developments in ‘open access’ scholarship. Many of the dominant platforms for academic publishing that are free for their readers operate by drawing fees from their contributors. Such arrangements frustrate if not subvert the opportunities presented by digital distribution of academic scholarship for use ‘on demand’. Thus we avoid them. Ours is an alternative, distinctive offer; a robust and imaginative response to the open access agenda. It issues from within the arts community and has an ethos of ‘openness’ toward those who may benefit from genuine open access scholarly activity online. We feel that this can be done best by drawing attention to pertinent themes and topics around which our guest editors and contributors assemble. This way of working distinguishes the Open Arts Journal as a fresh and critical departure, bridging divides between interest groups and offering a platform for artists to show their creative works, and the space for architectural schools and curatorial initiatives to extend their reach. Central to our approach is to challenge the tendency to ‘overspecialisation’ that so sorely compromises the arts and humanities. To be open to the exploration of creative and critical questions that stand over and above a particular historical period of interest is vital to us, and we are seeking ways to press beyond this, engaging more widely and benefitting from approaches other than the historical.

Based on the Think.Check.Submit framework by DOAJ, COPE & OASPA. All data from verified open sources.

Subject Classification