Hi, Folks.  Thank you to everyone who responded to my Alert last week.  I don't mean to trash open access publishing in general; I actually think it's a great idea, though, having spent decades serving on tenure and promotion committees, I see the path to legitimizing it for lit studies as long and torturous. And it's definitely an arena that I know little about, despite having attended workshops about it at my university.

 I've done a little more research, both on open access generally and a little more on MDPI.  For those interested, one website of possible interest is the Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association (https://oaspa.org/), which seems to serve as an umbrella organization for open access publishers.  One of the portals (https://oaspa.org/membership/members/) lists MDPI under its "Large Publisher" category.  The MDPI page gives the publisher's details, including the fact that they charge to publish articles because they do not charge to read them.  I know that many science journals also charge to publish, and I realize that although the practice seems odd to us in the humanities, it does not, in itself, mean that journals doing so are not legitimate--only that the ways that we think about funding scholarly publishing are shifting.

So I offer these links for those seeking to understand a little more about the ever-evolving world of publishing.  Best of luck, everyone.  --Susan Harris



https://oaspa.org/
OASPA | Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association<https://oaspa.org/>
OASPA Webinar Series. OASPA Statements. Best practices in licensing and attribution: What you need to know. OASPA's Open Access Resources. Information and videos from past conferences. Think. Check. Submit: helping researchers to make informed publication choices. Directory of Open Access Journals, DOAJ: doaj.org OASPA Licensing Frequently Asked Questions
oaspa.org



Susan K. Harris