Interaction | Society – Theory – Praxis | Open Access

Textpraxis. Digitales Journal für Philologie is the online journal of the Graduate School Practices of Literature, Münster, and is published every six months.

Within the humanities the scientific communication shifts more and more from publishing monographs to articles in scientific journals. Therefore the publishing practice within the humanities come closer to the publishing culture within natural sciences and changes its frequency of contributions.

In the course of this development the publication platforms change as well: more and more relevant research results are published online instead of in exclusively printed and partly difficult accessible scientific journals. The debate on the changes of the quality of scientific works with regard to Open Access, meaning the unlimited and nonpaid access to knowledge, continues. Opinions range from the view that good publications deserve to be appreciated via print to the plausible argument that the quality of a scientific work does not depend on the medium (book or internet). The Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and other high-ranking scientific organizations insistently support Open Access as an element of best possible information infrastructure. It is already evident that the future of academic knowledge transfer will be less interested in extensive print-journal projects and that democratization and internationalization of the accessibility through the internet will establish themselves in the long run. To consequently realize this fundamental idea of Open Access, Textpraxis has opted for Diamond Open Access, which enables participation in academic discourse for scientists at all career levels.

The simple transfer of the concept of a journal that is printed and published by a publishing company to an online version remains significantly behind the potential of a scientific publication in the internet. Therefore Textpraxis wants to use the networking potential of an online publication to not only relocate the publishing location of scientific articles to the internet but also to establish the process of production and reception of academic writing as dialogic interaction.

Basic rules of academic writing remain unchanged: publications in Textpraxis have one or more responsible authors, follow the principles of scientific publishing with regard to indication of sources and argumentation, the articles will be available on long-term basis at a fixed location on the internet and citable as unalterable documents. These documents will be clearly assigned to their authors so that in case of the decision for a publication in Textpraxis the copyright is fully preserved.

Interaction

Textpraxis uses the specific possibilities of an e-journal to encourage a creative dialogue between contributors, reviewers and readers. In this way Textpraxis establishes the process of production and reception of academic writing as dialogic interaction. Three constituents characterize the concept of Textpraxis:

1. Review
The reviewing process of the submitted articles is explicitely installed as a dialogue. Reviewers are less gatekeepers than source of constructive criticism to optimize the quality of the argumentation and writing together with the authors

2. Commentary
All registered readers have the opportunity to comment on the articles published in Textpraxis. These comments are visible for all users on Textpraxis's websites. The comments can be used to refer to continuing literature, to identify related problems or to answer questions which remained open in the article.

3. Debate
Textpraxis encourages its readers to react on contributions already published in Textpraxis with their own articles, which further deal controversially with theses and unresolved problems. In this way a forum for debates is generated based on Textpraxis, which through corresponding linking and structuralizations are fully accessible anytime. In contrast to the comments these replicas are reviewed and editorially supervised like regular articles.

Through the combination of review, comments and debates there is the possibility to work problem-oriented together on scientific questions without being limited to local research groups. In this way an active dialogue beyond disciplinary boundaries shall be enabled without favoring particular views. Textpraxis therefore establishes a way of communication, which makes scientific findings visible as a multistage and polyphonic process.

Society – Theory – Praxis

The concept of Textpraxis follows in content the profile of the Graduate School Practices of Literature and its three thematic pillars:

  1. Literature and Society
  2. Theories of Literary Study
  3. Literary Studies and Praxis

According to this every issue of Textpraxis is subdivided into three sections. For the sections »Literature and Society« and »Theories of Literary Study« the forms of contributions are scientific articles according to the standards of literary studies.

In the section »Literary Studies and Praxis« also non-scientists shall get a chance to speak, that means writers and others involved in cultural processes, for example from the publishing industry or journalism as well as people with a job profile that is literature related. These contributions can also be essays, interviews or journalistic texts.

Textpraxis is published every six months with at least one article per section, replicas are published continuously and independently from this frequency.

Open Access

Textpraxis a diamond open access journal which means that all content is freely available without charge to the user or their institution. Users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without asking prior permission from the publisher or the author. This is in accordance with the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) definition of open access. Since issue # 11 all articles are published under a Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International.

For further information regarding Open Access please visit the sites of the information platform open-access.net.

Textpraxis operates within the WWU's Open-Access-Guidelines.

If you have any questions or suggestions regarding our concept, please contact the editorial team via our contact form.