Mission

openwork is a peer-reviewed journal that publishes research into experimental music, art and scholarship. Interdisciplinary in scope, our journal promotes new modes of interaction between scholars and practitioners whose work critically re-listens, through and across, boundaries and constraints.

Aim & Scope

The editors of openwork seek to facilitate an inclusive scholarly space dedicated to the liberating potential of experimentalism—a space that allows for new ways of relating and world-making to be heard. We look to publish new work by scholars and artists who fall outside of existing discourses prefiguring who and what counts as experimental and encourage submissions which circumvent, subvert, or redraw constraints in and around the improvisation of identity, and other modes of relating to worlds and their outsides.

openwork welcomes articles and artworks that deal with experimentalism as a form of relistening, remaking, rethinking normative modes of scholarship, artistic expression and modes of living. We publish full-length academic essays (about 5000 – 7000 words), shorter creative pieces, cultural commentaries, artistic reflections (about 500 – 2500 words), and artworks, including, but not limited to, poetry, photo-essays, short films, visual and sound art, or any combinations of these (not exceeding 4 pages, 10 min, and/or 10GB). We welcome submissions from students, performers, composers, artists, activists and scholars. openwork publishes portions of the peer-review process, in an effort to encourage scholarly collaboration and dialogic practices. Peer-reviews, articles and artworks are often tied together by short pieces and commentary from the editors.

Open Access Policy

openwork is an open access journal. Our published content is free to access without charge to the user or their institution. Users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles in this journal without asking prior permission from the publisher or the author. Authors retain their copyright and agree to license their articles with a Creative Commons “Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives” License (CC BY-NC-ND) unless otherwise noted on the article landing page. You can read more about Creative Commons licenses at creativecommons.org.

openwork charges no author fees upon submission or acceptance.

Archiving Policy

openwork is archived in Columbia University’s Academic Commons. Academic Commons is Columbia University’s institutional repository, offering long-term public access to research shared by the Columbia community. A program of the Columbia University Libraries, Academic Commons provides secure, replicated storage for files in multiple formats. Academic Commons assigns a DOI and accurate metadata to each work to enhance discoverability.

Code of Ethics

openwork expects its members to uphold the highest standards of personal and professional behavior. openwork’s authors should adhere to the ethical professional standards as defined by:

• Cambridge University Press’s Publishing Ethics Guidelines

It is essential that all who participate in producing the journal, who conduct themselves as authors, reviewers and editors, strictly adhere to the highest level of ethical professional standards. By submitting a manuscript to this journal, each author explicitly confirms that the manuscript meets the highest ethical standards.