Feeding the Elephant: A Forum for Scholarly Communications is excited to celebrate its fifth birthday in September 2024. Founded in 2019 by Catherine Cocks and Yelena Kalinsky, the blog has grown into a feminist-run collective, currently led by Catherine Cocks, Dawn Durante, and Emily Joan Elliott, that regularly publishes pieces about scholarly communications in the arts, humanities, and social sciences.
When founding the forum, Cocks and Kalinsky recognized that the current crisis in scholarly communications is fueled by the often-siloed conversations of its practitioners: publishers, librarians, scholars. Scholarly communications as a whole often resembles the fabled elephant that looks, feels, and sounds different, depending on who’s describing it. They hoped Feeding the Elephant would become a place where all who advance humanities and social sciences research and publishing could speak with each other about the future of scholarly communications, a conversation that has frequently been STEM-dominated.
The Elephant’s earliest posts focused on peer review, print and digital publishing, and diversity, equity, and inclusion. As the landscape of scholarly communications changes and current events provide new angles for considering these topics, the Elephant revisits them and has also grown to include new series such as Working with Your Editor, Working with Your Librarian, book reviews, career advice, and Varieties of University Press Business Models. Our readers also get conference reports and updates related to Banned Books Week, University Press Week, Peer Review Week, and Open Access Week–anything and everything related to publishing in the humanities and social sciences.
Feeding the Elephant thrives thanks to contributions from our volunteer guest authors, who bring an array of voices and expert knowledge to the forum. In January 2024, Greg Cram and Kathleen Riegelhaupt wrote our most-read piece so far, which introduced the New York Public Library’s Scholarly Press Backlist Revival Project. Nahir Otaño Gracia’s 2022 post, “A Critical Subjective Analysis of Objectivity,” argued that “white academia needs to stop pretending that white heteronormative subjectivity is objectivity,” also proved popular.
Anthony Cond, 2024-2025 president of the Association of University Presses and author of the Elephant post “Varieties of University Press Business Models: The Subsidiary Company at Liverpool University Press,” says, “Simultaneously speaking to and for university presses, Feeding the Elephant has become essential reading over the past five years. Catherine Cocks, Dawn Durante, and Emily Joan Elliott have helped to demystify university press publishing for those outside of it, while enhancing the knowledge of those within.”
“Feeding the Elephant is an important publication for scholarly communications in our digital age,” according to Robert Cassanello, associate professor of history at the University of Central Florida, former vice president of research and publications and president of H-Net, and author of the Elephant post “The Podcast Review and Reviewing Born Digital Scholarly Works.” Cassanello went on to say that Feeding the Elephant grapples with “issues related to editing, publishing, and reviewing just as academic publications were being transformed by systems of immediate and electronic access to scholarly as well as public audiences. The authors connected to Feeding the Elephant have left us with a body of knowledge that will prepare us for the years to come.”
The Elephant’s editorial team is proud of having cared for and nurtured this forum for the last five years. In our next five, we hope to diversify the Elephant’s diet with more posts related to academic librarianship and pieces by authors from the global south that address the issues of scholarly communications there.
About Feeding the Elephant Feeding the Elephant publishes on Wednesdays, weekly during the academic year and biweekly over the summer and winter recesses. Follow the Elephant on Bluesky and subscribe directly to our H-Net forum. We invite everyone with something informative and constructive to say about scholarly communications to pitch us via email at feeding.the.elephant@mail.h-net.org or Bluesky @hnetbookchannel.bsky.social.
Catherine Cocks is the director of Syracuse University Press. She has worked in scholarly publishing since 2002 at SAR Press, the University of Iowa Press, the University of Washington Press, and Michigan State University Press. She is eternally grateful to Yelena Kalinsky for turning her elephant-feeding fantasy into a reality. You can follow her on social media at Bluesky.
Dawn Durante is Wyndham Robertson Editorial Director at University of North Carolina Press, where she primarily acquires in the fields of African American history, Black feminist studies, Black women’s history, girlhood studies, and carceral studies, and oversees three series. Prior to joining UNC Press, she was Editor-in-Chief at University of Texas Press and senior acquiring editor at University of Illinois Press. You can follow her on social media at Bluesky and Threads.
Emily Joan Elliott is associate director for research and publications at H-Net. In that role, she is the managing editor for H-Net Reviews and assists scholars in sharing their research in a variety of ways. Emily spent several years working in journalism as a reporter and editor and is interested in how scholars can share their work inside and outside the academy, particularly through nonprofit, open-source means.
Yelena Kalinsky was associate director for research and publications at H-Net, overseeing book reviews, open access journals, and podcasts. Yelena Kalinsky left her position at H-Net in May 2022 to pursue a new career.
Member News Release submitted by Syracuse University on 09/04/24.
