This looks great.  

It could also potentially be the reverse couldn't it - that publishing
standards are in fact increasing, but only for a select few.  It could be
that the publishing industry is engaging in the same sort of flight to
quality witnessed in the financial services industry, with 'premier
accounts' (reduced publication/lead in times, direct lines to 'business'
managers, encouragement to 'expand', friendly and encouraging feedback and
publication schedules etc) becoming the preserve of the 'lucky' few, and the
more standard publishing services being increasingly difficult to access for
the majority, many of whom might self exclude due to staff rudeness,
heightened costs, the feeling they will be rejected, and so on.  

Just waiting for 2006 and the declaration from Blackwells that they do
things in 'another way'...

-----Original Message-----
From: A forum for critical and radical geographers
[mailto:[log in to unmask]]On Behalf Of Williams, Prof C.C.
Sent: 25 November 2005 14:54
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Are publishing standards declining?


Dear Critters

Below is an attempt to enact an alternative to the problem identified,
launched today. Your support in developing this 'alternative economic space'
would be greatly appreciated. I am sure that the editors would welcome
scripts from critical geographers.

Colin C Williams  
 
---------------------------------------------------
 
Announcement of mayflybooks (www.mayflybooks.org)

Today, at one and the same time, scholarly publishing is drawn in two
directions. On the one hand, this is a time of the most exciting
theoretical, political and artistic projects that respond to and seek to
move beyond global administered society. On the other hand, the publishing
industries are vying for total control of the ever-lucrative arena of
scholarly publication, creating a situation in which it is increasingly hard
to publish works grounded in research and in radical interrogation of the
present. As a result, as publishers become fixated on the textbook market
and academic books become ever more expensive, with many books only ever
being sold as hardbacks these days, which means that they are more likely to
get dusty on university library shelves rather than read, and rarely read by
those that authors might hope to reach.

In this context, a new book publishing press is being established:
mayflybooks. This press draws on the most exciting contemporary theorising
concerned with organization, its theoretical and political consequences and
presumptions. It specifically seeks to publish works that are currently
excluded by the publishing industries, either because of their progressive
politics or their apparent lack of a mass market. mayflybooks will draw on
the now available new technologies for distribution, specifically,
distribution of downloadable PDFs via the internet and cheap paperbacks
published in very short production runs. mayflybooks will publish
high-quality books that are available either free of charge (as PDFs on the
internet) or as easily affordable paperbacks. This press is a truly
not-for-profit operation. It will publish books that matter, and at present
this involves bypassing the 'publishing' industry, which is no longer in
public hands and hence fails to represent any public.

The press develops out of the journal project 'ephemera: theory & politics
in organization' (www.ephemeraweb.org), which has been publishing its free
content online since 2001, and works alongside other alternative adventures
in publishing. In this way, it retains what is best in the ethos of
ephemera: a passion of ideas, exploration of new terrain, radical democratic
politics, suspicion of all essentialism and closure (conservative or
vanguardist), and joyfulness and provocativeness. mayflybooks looks to
publish engagements with all aspects of organization that are theoretically
astute, politically relevant and aesthetically engaging. While the concrete
focus of the press is 'organization', a broad range of inter-disciplinary
engagements with organization will be published, which will continue to work
in relation to an expanded or 'general economy of organization' and of the
way that organization can be interrogated. The press sees its audience in a
wide variety of terrains, ranging from students and researchers working in
organization, management, cultural and social studies to activists working
in organizations and in government and non-governmental organizations,
alongside anti-capitalist and other emerging social movements.

Call for Contributions: 
Specifically, mayflybooks seeks submissions that address the following areas
(although this is not an exclusive list):
- Feminist interrogations of the organization of organization and society; 
- Anti-racist, postcolonial and subaltern studies of organization; 
- Engagements with critical theory, poststructuralism and other
philosophical movements and the evaluation of their political significance
for the study of organization; 
- The relationship between art, aesthetics and cultural organization; 
- Critical accounts of consumption and overconsumption; 
- Collective action and political protest, politics of social movements,
organizations of resistance; 
- Development and the marginalisation of the global South; 
- Conceptualisations and empirical investigations of subjectivity; 
- Contemporary theories and politics of work and labour; 
- Critiques of contemporary discourses of critique, particularly in critical
management studies; 
- Ontological, epistemological and methodological perspectives of the study
of organization; 
- Critiques of contemporary capitalism, ideology and Empire; 
- Interrogations of the organization of technology, data, information and
knowledge; 
- Work on organization, history, time and change; 
- Spatial organization and architecture; 
- Analyses of the relations between war and organization; 
- The organization of cooperative, alternative and anticapitalist
communities; 
- Utopias of organizational life; 
- Poetics and literatures of organization. 

Submission Details: 
The editors seek to publish books in a variety of formats, and their lengths
of books will vary according the requirements of the particular project.
Innovative interventions and presentations of texts are encouraged, and the
inclusion of images can also be considered, in the context of production
costs. Book proposals should outline the rationale and aims of the book, and
show how the proposed book challenges - theoretically and politically - the
perceived wisdom of organizational practice or theory. Book proposals should
normally not be longer than 5-8 pages and should include a preliminary table
of contents and a projected schedule including submission date of the full
manuscript.

All contributions will be published in English and should not have been
published, or submitted for publication, in another forum. Translations of
work published in languages other than English will be considered. Book
proposals and manuscripts should be submitted as Word or RTF file. All
submissions should be fully referenced and may contain footnotes or
endnotes. Every submission should be accompanied by a Curriculum Vitae and a
biographical note not longer than 200 words, in any style. Please also
provide both an email and postal address. The Editors of mayflybooks will
consider all proposals or manuscripts and promising proposals will be
reviewed by suitably qualified reviewers. Authors will be kept up to date on
the status of their submission via regular email correspondence.

Distribution: 
It is our view that there is no justification for the currently exorbitant
prices asked by corporate and university publishers for research monographs.
mayflybooks explicitly proposes a timely response to the restrictions
imposed by an increasingly limited academic book market. This press is
interested in getting ideas 'out there', and one way of doing this is to
publish books that are either available free of charge or for very little
money. As a consequence, authors will not be paid royalties. As far as
possible, we propose that ideas, but not money, will pass from hand to hand.
Books will be published under the Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5). The philosophy of this
should be clear: we are interested in ideas and believe that access to ideas
should not be a matter of one's economic resources. The goal of mayflybooks
is to engage the public, or to put it simply, to reintroduce the public into
publishing.

Contact: 
For further details, visit www.mayflybooks.org. Please send proposals to
[log in to unmask], or contact the editors:

Steffen Bvhm, University of Essex, [log in to unmask]
Campbell Jones, University of Leicester, [log in to unmask]


To be notified about new happenings at mayflybooks, go to:
http://www.mayflybooks.org/notification.htm

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Professor Colin C Williams
The Management Centre
University of Leicester
Leicester LE1 7RH
United Kingdom
Tel: +44 (0)116 252 5387
E-mail: [log in to unmask]

Editor, International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy,
http://www.emeraldinsight.com/info/journals/ijssp/ijssp.htm

Editor, International Journal of Community Currencies Research,
http://www.le.ac.uk/ulmc/ijccr

To see my book, 'Cash-in-Hand Work', visit
http://www.palgrave.com/products/Catalogue.aspx?is=1403921725

For details of my book, 'A Commodified World? mapping the limits of
capitalism', visit:
http://zedweb.cybergecko.net/cgi-raw/a.cgi?1%2084277%20354%202

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