As far as I’m concerned, pretty much anything can be considered scholarship. I like books, journals are fine, but if someone wants to use a podcast or a zine or a meme to communicate about their area of expertise, that should count for just as much. Yes, yes, peer review, but let’s not pretend that’s some perfect arbiter of worth. Besides, you can peer review anything if you put your mind to it (shout out to Hannah McGregor and Wilfrid Laurier University Press for their excellent scholarly podcasting open peer review work).
The thing is, when you’re publishing scholarship, it generally gets sent through all these pipes and tubes to come out into places where people can find it, and it gets mashed into shape in the process. It’s like a kids game where you’re supposed to put the square block into the square hole, the circle in the circle and so on. If you have a journal article and a journal article shaped tube, you’re set. But what if all the tubes are book and journal shaped and your block is a zine? What are your options?
Well, first of all, you could ask nicely for someone to make a zine shaped tube. Or even make one yourself, if you’re in a position to do so. But that takes time, and most people won’t use that tube, and there are naysayers who think there’s no good reason for a zine shaped tube and you are insulting their honour by suggesting it.
So instead, you could try and make your zine block look like a book or a journal and kind of sneak your way in. It’s not a huge stretch - there are pages and contributors and it might be part of a series, all of which are very normal, tube-appropriate features.
This is the theory I’m testing at the moment. I have a zine, I have a press and I have a healthy disrespect for the rules.
Pure chaos.
The zine (forthcoming) has been created as part of the Community Publishing Garden, a project started via Radish Press, in collaboration with Kath Burton of Radically Hopeful. In September 2024, we partnered with the Center for The Humanities at the CUNY Graduate Center to bring together an amazing group of folks doing community publishing in their own unique ways. We've now created a zine based on our conversations that we’re just about ready to publish.
Now, I’m pretty new to the zine world, so I am still learning and in no way claim that anything I’m doing is original or even a good idea. I just wanted to see what it’s like to try and push it through the tubes on my own.
To start, I figured that looks like:
- Figuring out sensible metadata
- Getting a DOI
- Putting it into a catalogue
- Attempting some indexing
Metadata
Other very qualified people have spent longer than I ever will thinking about metadata of all kinds, and that goes for zines, too. So I set out to find those people and copy their work (in a spirit-of-open way). Dr. Amanda Wyatt Visconti is quite brilliant, and has written a quite brilliant piece on zine metadata for collecting that I am using for guidance. Their zine catalogue scratches my brain in good ways, so I’ve created my own version to try out. Out of the gate, there are fields here that aren’t relevant, either because of the stage that I’m at (e.g. re: print), or because I’m approaching it from a publisher’s perspective, not a collector’s. But from their framework, I have decided on a short list of priority metadata fields to capture, and parked the rest to figure out later. The following are what I’ve settled on to start:
- Title
- Creator(s)
- Series
- Issue Number
- ISSN/ISBN
- DOI
- Publication Year
- License
- Page Count
- Formats Available
- Web-Readable Version (link)
- Tags
- Content Warnings
- Catalogues/Indexes
- Copyright Holder
The other important angle for defining our metadata is to look at the places where we want it to live, in order to see what they’re asking for. More on that in the indexing section, but the short version is: this list covers most of what we seem to be asked for, and we’ll cross any other bridges as we get to them.
DOI
Radish Press might be tiny and have barely published anything yet, but we are registered with CrossRef, so you best believe I’m getting a DOI for this thing. The question we face is: what do we register it as? CrossRef has 11 options, none of which are an obvious choice, but my first instinct was to call it “posted content”, which they define as: “Preprints and posted content: includes preprints, eprints, working papers, reports, and other types of content that has been posted but not formally published.”
Ah, but what’s the difference between “posting” and “formally publishing”? Their docs seem to conflate preprints and posted content at times, which isn’t helpful. On the one hand, it says that “to qualify as posted content, an item must be posted to a host platform where it will receive some level of stewardship. We’re all about persistence, so it’s vital that everything registered with us be maintained.” Sure! No problem. But then they say that “you must make it clear that posted content is unpublished and you must ensure that any link to the [Accepted Manuscript/Version of Record] is prominently displayed”. That makes total sense for a preprint journal article, but for my little zine that could? Less so. Overall, the posted content option seems pretty oriented towards works that are expected to evolve towards a “formally published” endpoint, and that is not the case with a zine. It’s not a step along the way or a supporting player, it’s the finished work.
There might be a case for calling it a journal, but I’m not the one to make it, and I don’t want to tread too far into unknown territory. So is a zine a book, instead? I mean, maybe. It has a lot in common with a book, albeit a short one, and the term ‘book’ is increasingly being used as a catch-all for content that doesn’t fit clearly into any other category. I run into this constantly, like in my work on PKP’s Open Monograph Press (OMP), where I’m trying to shift the structure away from a monograph/edited volume binary to encompass the broad range of content types OMP users are publishing. Some people call all of that other stuff ‘books’, but I am not one of those people. When I tell you I have spent hours, days, years of my life thinking about what a book is, I need you to believe me. But, given the choices in front of me, I am calling a zine a book. I will die on the what-is-a-book hill another day. As an added bonus, this means I can use CrossRef's web form to register the DOI and avoid the more complicated XML route.
With this choice made, registering it looks pretty straightforward, although to make it part of a series (which is my preference) they are asking for an ISSN. It’s very easy for me, a semi-Canadian, to apply for one of those through Library and Archives Canada, so I did, but we’ll have to wait and see what their response is. Worst case, we deal with the series bit later once there’s actually more than one issue. DOI records can be updated, which is nice.
Catalogue
In this game of trying to appear legible as a legitimate venue for scholarly publishing, Radish Press needs (and wants!) a catalogue. Long term, I’m hopeful that something like Meru from Next Generation Library Publishing (NGLP) will allow us to create a unified category for content published via many different platforms (full disclosure: I do some contract work on this project, so I’m a bit biased, but I really do think it’s neat). But for now, we have a website, and that will do.
I use Squarespace for the Radish Press site. It’s not a choice I feel amazing about, but it’s the one I made given that a) I have nowhere near the coding skills to host or make something look pretty myself, and b) I am utterly exhausted by the past decade of WordPress nonsense and feel like I no longer owe them any default open source allegiance. It is what it is. For this purpose, at least, it’s easy enough to set up a catalogue using the portfolio function, add in the metadata previously discussed, spend slightly too long faffing about with Canva to create a cover image, et voilà: a catalogue and a record for the zine issue (incomplete at the time of publication, but you'll forgive any messiness). And handily, this fulfills CrossRef’s landing page requirement.
Indexing & Archiving
The other pieces I’ve been figuring out in the Radish Press infrastructure puzzle are indexing, and its close friend, archiving. My strategy right now is basically “I hope Thoth can do this”.
Thoth is a non-profit, open metadata management and dissemination platform, emerging from the COPIM community, who have long been really impressive leaders in open book publishing. Thoth is book-shaped, but I know they’re super invested in things like bibliodiversity, and I’m lucky to have a contact there that I could talk to about how to approach using Thoth as a publisher doing more than just books and journals.
As with CrossRef, the problem of categorisation comes up immediately. When creating a work in Thoth your options are: book chapter, monograph, edited book, textbook, journal issue or book set. I have acquiesced to calling a zine a book for the purposes of DOI registration, so given the options, I will begrudgingly accept calling it a monograph. It is on a single subject, though not single-authored. It will do. Beyond that, Thoth’s structure is very friendly to my weirdness, and prompts you for plenty of metadata without requiring it. The only must-haves are:
- Work type (chapter, monograph etc. as above)
- Work status (forthcoming, active, withdrawn etc.)
- Imprint (your publisher name if you don’t have imprints)
- Title (self explanatory)
I’ve added as much other info as I can and hey presto, it shows up in the Thoth catalogue! The more challenging bit is getting it indexed anywhere else, which is available via Thoth Plus. Through their partnership with OAPEN, I could theoretically have it indexed in the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB), but the DOAB requires peer review for all submissions. As a collective, the creators have peer reviewed the final text, so we'll need to document that and hope it passes muster. The idea of running more formal peer review processes on zines is absolutely something I want to explore, but not right now. The other indexing options Thoth offers aren’t quite important enough for this very first little zine to spend the money on, so for now, we’ll be prioritising other methods of distribution (by which I mean posting it via socials, the CPG mailing list, and other word-of-mouth channels). The other advantage of Thoth Plus is archiving with the Internet Archive and/or their own preservation network (depending on which package you choose), but I’m putting that on the backburner for now, too.
Very honestly, the blocker here is just money. I would love to send this zine-in-book-drag out to the full list of indexes Thoth connects to (JSTOR, Project Muse, Google Books, ProQuest, EBSCO and more) but the only way to know for sure if they would accept it would be to try. The Community Publishing Garden project has some funds, having recently received a grant from the Open Book Collective Development Fund, but the priority is to grow the community around community publishing (very meta, I know), not to get a kick out of infiltrating Big Indexing, as fun as it would be. That said, the longer term vision for that project is to better establish the field of community publishing, which will hopefully come with more publications from Radish Press and others (zines and otherwise!), and more motivation to get publications out there through the channels that Thoth supports. The kind folks over there have also indicated that they'd be willing to comp us this one so we can continue the experiment, so that likely means there's a part two coming!
Back to the Tubes, Though
The verdict on going through this process, even without having completed it, is: it’s ok. It could have been worse, it could definitely be better, but at the end of the day, I haven’t yet run into any hard barriers, and so long as all this is fairly under the radar, I expect/hope that no one will tell me to stop. Maybe writing about it publicly is inviting trouble, but it will surprise no one who knows me that I’m ok with that. That’s kind of the point! I want to find the friction! So far, it seems that we can sneak a zine through a book-shaped tube, even if it’s not very satisfying. But the same wouldn’t necessarily be true for other “non-traditional” formats. How would an infographic fare? Or a podcast? Things without so many words and pages. It's unclear. Best believe I’m going to give it a go at some point. Regardless, the biggest issue might be the lack of context at the other end of the tube, where a reader is encountering something categorised as a book/monograph when it’s actually something else. Another thing to come back to in part two.
There’s a core question here of whether it matters for stuff like zines to be made as discoverable and accessible as other forms of scholarship, and in the same places. To me, it does, because they are as valuable to our collective knowledge as anything else. There’s no “Collective Knowledge ‘R’ Us” portal where absolutely everything is available, ready to discover – it is much more amorphous than that. We’re dealing with an infinitely complex global network via which knowledge is circulated. The existing scholarly publishing system is a major part of that network, and confers all sorts of legitimacy to those it lets through the gates (for better or worse (sometimes much, much worse)). So, sneaking in where we can helps us to access some of that power and reach, while simultaneously troubling it and hopefully creating some momentum for building new pathways into it for all kinds of content. At the same time, there is every reason to keep building out parallel distribution systems, whether it's a scholarly zine collective or a comprehensive open catalogue like Open Alex. The exclusivity of scholarly publishing is a feature, not a bug, and I’m not out here pretending like the institution will save us.
Ultimately, as a publisher, it’s good to know that I can roughly make the existing system work for me, even if I would much prefer there to be better recognition that not everything is a book. My goal with this exercise is to figure out a solid process for publishing scholarly zines (and other weird and wonderful stuff), so that Radish Press can provide support to the folks who want to make them, and help them get recognition for their work in all the ways that matter to them. If that’s you, maybe we should talk and do some radical publishing stuff together. And stay tuned for part two.
Photo by Vasilis Chatzopoulos on Unsplash