The Journal of Visual Culture in conjunction with ANVC, Vectors, and others has launched a new portfolio on the “Future of Scholarly Publishing.”  Collecting more formal versions of talks presented at Now! Visual Culture in May 2012, the set of articles traces the ethical imperatives around the changing ecology of academic publishing.  As Mark Little and Marquard Smith note in their intro to the portfolio:

“On 11^th January 2013, Aaron Swartz was found dead in his New York apartment, having apparently taken his own life. He was 26. A web programmer, co-founder of Reddit, and advocate of free-data, Swartz had been arrested in July 2011, and was being sued for downloading and attempting to release 4.8 million academic articles from the digital library JSTOR. He was arrested in July 2011, charged with data theft-related crimes, and was due to stand trail in April 2013. If convicted he faced over 30 years in prison. On January 9^th 2013, JSTOR announced that the archives of more than 1,200 journals were now available for, as Library Journal puts it, ‘limited free reading by the public’. Such free reading amounts to three articles every two weeks. We have a long way to go.”

Authors in the portfolio include Katherine Behar, Gary Hall, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, and Tara McPherson.  You can find the portfolio here.