Media and Environment

About

Focus and Scope

(Please note that Media+Environment is officially written as Media and Environment for citations and record-keeping purposes.)

Film and media studies conventionally encompass the analysis of film, television, and a growing panoply of digital media platforms, practices, and technologies. However, scholars in the field are also increasingly and deeply concerned with media’s embeddedness in environmental contexts and with environments themselves as media, capable of signaling and transforming both the human and the elemental.

Accordingly expansive and inclusive in its orientation, Media+Environment supports scholarship about media texts and contexts: histories, technologies, networks, infrastructures, data, social media, artistic and creative works, and regulatory pipelines and policies. Together with humanistic social science scholars concentrating on media, we will advance dialogues with scientists and other interlocutors and stimulate new research seeking to connect these phenomena to a broader spatial and environmental consciousness of urgent interest.

In addition to research articles, we are interested in publishing interviews, commentaries, reviews, and audiovisual works, and also serving as a secure digital depository for a wide range of projects.

Media+Environment considers all items submitted via the online submission system.

Articles: Articles will undergo double-blind peer-review. Length should range between 5,000-7,500 words in length, although shorter and longer contributions may be considered. Articles may include elements such as images, tables, graphs, and illustrations, as well as multimedia elements (audio and video files, maps, datasets, etc.). Any multimedia content will be reviewed for substance, and checked to ensure that it can be technically supported and that permissions to publish have been granted.

Reviews: Reviews may be of single-authored monographs, edited collections, films, games, festivals, installations or exhibitions, and so on. Reviews will also undergo double-blind peer-review, and should be limited to 3,000 words.

Creative works: We welcome nontraditional academic scholarship in the form of short videos, games, comics, animations, and more. As with traditional scholarship, multimedia content will be reviewed by those with appropriate expertise, and also checked to ensure it can be technically supported.

Publication Frequency

The journal is published online as a continuous annual volume throughout the calendar year. Articles are made available as soon as they are ready to ensure that there are no unnecessary delays in getting content publicly available. Thematic collections are continuously coordinated and populated. All special collections—known as “streams”—can be found here.

Open Access Policy

This journal provides immediate Open Access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge.

Authors of articles published remain the copyright holders and grant third parties, via a CC-BY license, the right to use, reproduce, and share the article according to the Creative Commons license agreement.

As an Open Access offering, the journal will be open to all, not hidden behind a subscriber paywall. As a humanities journal, we have chosen not to implement Author Publication Fees otherwise known as Article Processing Charges (APCs) used in the sciences and social sciences where there are more opportunities for grant support.
The Carsey-Wolf Center is our main sponsor along with support from UC Santa Barbara’s Division of Humanities and Fine Arts, the University of Vermont, and Monash University. We will continue to seek additional funding and to build an international consortium of university and institutional partners supportive of the journal’s goals.
Under this new, non-subscription-based and non-APC-based business model, which we’re helping to invent, quantity of content is directly related to funding support.

Archiving Policy

Journal content is discoverable and accessible through various indexing services. Content is also archived around the world to guarantee long-term availability.

The journal is or will be indexed by the field appropriate services: CrossRef, JISC KB+, SHERPA RoMEO, Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), EBSCOHost, and Google Scholar. In addition, the journal is available for harvesting via OAI-PMH.

To ensure permanency of all publications, this journal also utilises the Portico archive to create permanent archives for the purposes of preservation and restoration. If the journal is not indexed by your preferred indexing service, please let us know by emailing support@ubiquitypress.com or alternatively by making an indexing request directly with the service.

Annotation and post-publication comment

The journal platform permits readers to leave comments on the publication page, via the Disqus service. Readers will need a Disqus account to leave comments. Comments may be moderated by the journal, however, if they are non-offensive and relevant to the publication subject, comments will remain online without edit.

The journal platform also includes in-browser annotation and text highlighting options via hypothes.is. Readers will require a hypothes.is account to create annotations, and will have the option to make these public or private.