Work in Progress. An Interim Editorial

Aus der Werkstatt: ein Zwischeneditorial


Public History Weekly (PHW) has taken an exceptionally long summer break, as signaled by its home page and its low level of public activity. PHW, as can be learned from this editorial, will not be releasing new publications for a short while yet. The editors explain the current state of affairs and give an outlook.

What is the state of affairs?

PHW’s work was based on two co-operation contracts between equals over a period of seven years. The first contract was initially concluded between the School of Education FHNW (Basel) and the academic publisher De Gruyter Oldenbourg (2013-2016), the second between the Universities of Vienna and Wrocław and the Schools of Education Lucerne and FHNW and De Gruyter (2016-2020). This kind of true co-operation of different universities with a large publishing house on a collaborative basis was and is quite unusual, and some had trouble understanding the scope of this novelty.

The same applies to the concept of the “BlogJournal”, as we have labeled this publication in our subtitle for a very long time. The term stands for a concept that meant since its launch in 2013 nothing else but that we wanted to bring together the best of the digital and analogue publishing worlds in a new type of academic journal. “Blog-” was the attribute of the noun “journal”. In the meantime, the systematic extension of academic publishing to Twitter, Facebook or Instagram has become more familiar to a mostly conservative readership of the humanities; that allows us to modify the subtitle signal a little, to mark a new public focus. From now on, Public History Weekly is called an open peer review journal. This term means that quality assurance of publications is carried out upstream in a multi-level and multi-instance editorial process and downstream by requested and spontaneous peer comments from external experts. We believe that this editorial framework leads to more flexibility and discursivity for an academic publication that addresses a broad public and is comparably more suitable for this undertaking than the common double blind peer review. And maybe not just for that.

During these last seven years, major amounts of money have been invested by public institutions and De Gruyter publishing house yielding in 403 multi-lingual articles by 142 authors from 28 countries on 6 continents and a total of 626 in-depth peer comments. Our texts are available in 14 different languages, always with an English and a German version. The financial resources of the five founders were spent locally for the respective cooperative services or were pooled in Basel, where years ago the non-profit Public History Weekly Friends’ Asscociation (PHW-Förderverein) was founded, which also manages the donations that reach us, most recently via Steady.com.

Our work can still be supported by the readers of our publication. We are very grateful for every donation. Multilingualism in Open Access causes high costs. Please follow the Steady window when you access one of our articles. But you can also contact the Förderverein from here and provide direct support:

What is new?

In the first half of this, shall we say, eventful year 2020, we took significant steps to renew Public History Weekly. While maintaining and cultivating the basic concept of publishing, our aim has been to include new content stimulations in the journal, that will hopefully increase furthermore its weekly novelty, diversity and scope in the best sense of the word. We are pleased to welcome 14 new colleagues as co-editors, all of them well-known and renowned history and public history scholars from Brazil, Colombia, the USA, Ireland, Great Britain, Russia, Lebanon and Palestine, Australia and, as before, Poland, Austria, Germany and Switzerland. These editors work in autonomous teams and will each be responsible for the content of one topic month, one issue per year.

We also want to make excellent young voices of public history more visible in our journal. To this end, the editors have two dedicated contact persons in their ranks, who are still close to this professional development phase: Courtney Ann Neaveill and Moritz Hoffmann. In the future, publication offers from doctoral candidates will have their own address with these two editors. Articles of doctoral candidates can be published time and again in our “Speakers’ Corner” section, which is thematically independent of the topic month, based on a final decision by the editorial board and the publisher.

Executive Board | Herausgeber

Public History Weekly is currently in an intermediate phase. The old cooperation agreement has expired and a new legal framework for the institution has not yet been finalised. As of today, this much is clear that the De Gruyter publishing house will play a more important role in the future than it has done up to now and that the two Swiss Schools of Education in Lucerne and Muttenz (formerly Basel) will thankfully most probably continue to act as financial sponsors with a share of the funding. Further essential clarifications regarding the new contract structure are still pending.

The composition and organisation of the future new Advisory Board is still pending, but we hope to be able to announce this before Christmas.

We very much hope that we will be able to push ahead with the processes of internal renewal in the coming months, so that PHW can appear again in a regular weekly rhythm beginning early spring of 2020. For the time being, it remains possible to suggest manuscripts to the Managing Editor which can be published without a fixed rhythm.

Intermezzo

For the home page, I have selected four articles that show very well the spirit for which the journal Public History Weekly stands: for interaction, collaborative supplementation of arguments, preferably pointed, but always open-minded and respectful controversial exchange.

We therefore present our readers with a selection of the most discussed articles. This selection represents just a welcome rate of interaction; other possible selection criteria were not taken into consideration in this particular case. Two Canadian, one Argentinian and one German author spread out their topics. Three of the four articles address current and historically charged issues, which concurs with one of the journal’s main goals.

  • Carretero, Mario. “Reconquest” – Historical Narrative or Xenophobic View? | “Reconquista” – Narrativa historica o concepción xenofóbica? | “Reconquista” – Historisches Narrativ oder xenophobe Sichtweise?, PHW 7 (2019) 7 vom 28. Februar 2019, DOI: dx.doi.org/10.1515/phw-2019-13423.
  • Sandkühler, Thomas. Historians and Politics. Quarrel Over a Current Resolution | Historiker*innen und Politik. Streit um eine aktuelle VHD-Resolution, PHW 6 (2018) 31 vom 18. Oktober 2018, DOI: dx.doi.org/10.1515/phw-2018-12675.
  • Lévesque, Stéphane. Removing the “Past”: Debates Over Official Sites of Memory | Déboulonner le “passé”: les sites officiels de la mémoire | “Vergangenheit” entfernen: Debatten über staatliche Erinnerungsorte, PHW 6 (2018) 29 vom 4. Oktober 2018, DOI: dx.doi.org/10.1515/phw-2018-12570.
  • Seixas, Peter. A History/Memory Matrix for History Education | Eine Geschichts-/Gedächtnis-Matrix für die Historische Bildung, PHW 4 (2016) 6 vom 25. Februar 2016, DOI: dx.doi.org/10.1515/phw-2016-5370.

We hope you will discover or rediscover many stimulating thoughts and views!

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Image Credits

Under the clock on the gateway to inside Caernarvon walls © Hefin Owen 2020, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

Recommended Citation

Demantowsky, Marko: Work in progress. Ad interim editorial. In: Public History Weekly 8 (2020) 8, DOI: dx.doi.org/10.1515/phw-2020-17257.

Copyright (c) 2020 by De Gruyter Oldenbourg and the author, all rights reserved. This work may be copied and redistributed for non-commercial, educational purposes, if permission is granted by the author and usage right holders. For permission please contact the editor-in-chief (see here). All articles are reliably referenced via a DOI, which includes all comments that are considered an integral part of the publication.

The assessments in this article reflect only the perspective of the author. PHW considers itself as a pluralistic debate journal, contributions to discussions are very welcome. Please note our commentary guidelines (https://public-history-weekly.degruyter.com/contribute/).


Categories: 8 (2020) 8
DOI: dx.doi.org/10.1515/phw-2020-17257

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