The first issue of Volume 25 of the recently reborn Journal of Electronic Publishing has brought a veritable smorgasboard of interesting articles relevant to our topics here at The Taper, and in particular to our Friday Big Deal Longread. (Perhaps the natural affinity between JEP and UVA shouldn’t be a surprise: our Dean of Libraries, John Unsworth, has been on its editorial board since the journal’s original inception.) Rather than pick any one article, I’m recommending the entire issue.

The Editor’s Gloss gives a succinct overview of the issue, which ranges from OA founding father Peter Suber’s essay on the needlessness of exclusive rights for academic publishers, to Jefferson Pooley’s scathing critique of the publishing oligopolists’ pivot to Surveillance Publishing, to Reggie Raju and Auliya Badrudeen’s essay on their efforts to develop an open access approach for Africa that puts social justice first. Other articles address preservation of digital scholarship, collective action approaches to building publishing tools and services, and several angles on the future of the (electronic) book. I’ve added the journal to my RSS reader, and I’m sure more articles from it will be making an appearance here in the future. Have a great weekend!