| Karen Estlund Head, Digital Library Services University of Oregon | Carol Stabile Professor, English Department University of Oregon |
The Fembot Collective is a collaborative of faculty, graduate students and librarians engaged in research on gender, new media and technology and a platform for communication about related issues. The collective includes faculty and graduate students from North America, the UK, Australia, and Asia and encourages interdisciplinary and international participation. Fembot aims to seize the means of scholarly production. One of its strategies for doing so is the creation of an open access journal, Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, with a re-envisioned model of peer review and tools for multi-modal publication, community and promotion. Not content with creating traditional scholarship that will appear online, Fembot is redefining what scholarly communication means in a digital environment by transforming the concept of the “article” and embracing multi-modal technologies for production and distribution. Fembot is in its initial phase of development with its first issue of Ada in progress. The University of Oregon (UO) Libraries is partnering with the Fembot collective to provide support and consultation on digital preservation, presentation, and bibliometrics. Rather than act as a publisher for the content, the Libraries is functioning as a true partner with the expert scholars to transform scholarly publishing, with a librarian serving as a permanent member of the collective’s advisory board.