Open Media Scholarship: The Case for Open Access in Media Studies

This commentary, after outlining the broader rationale for open access in scholarly publishing, makes three arguments to support the claim that media and communication scholars should be at the forefront of the open access movement: (1) The topics that we write about are inescapably multimedia, so our publishing platforms should be capable-at the very least-of embedding the objects that we study; (2) media studies, owing to their fragmentation and marginality, can sidestep the prestige "penalty" that drags down other disciplines' open access efforts; and (3) our rich research traditions on popular media dynamics are begging to be applied (and perhaps rethought) in the context of scholarly communication.