Today, April 1, 2020, marks 9 years of punctum books! In that time, we have published roughly 300 projects created by people all around the world, and have collaborated with many of you to develop the human and technical infrastructure that continues to help our publics thrive. We would like to sincerely thank all of you for keeping us going all these years.
And with that, welcome to the new punctum books newsletter! We recognize that these are extraordinary times and that many of you are faced with extraordinary measures that are showing both the failure of the economic and social concepts that our government by and large continue to deploy and the need to radically reconfigure our way of being with each other and the world.
Many of our authors in the present and past have opened some of the questions and issues that have become so much more urgent, now that novel RNA strands subvert the productive capacities in many of our bodies' cells. As a result, we have compiled a brief reading list of punctum books publications that you may want to read or browse through as various forms of lockdown, containment, and quarantine are imposed upon us. As always, all books are fully open access and downloadable for free from our website.
Finally, as you may notice, this newsletter has a new, simpler layout and is sent from a different service, phpList. The transition to phpList is part of punctum books's commitment to transition as much as possible to open-source software solutions, as we explain here.
Viral Open Access in Times of Global Pandemic
punctum comms, Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei
"The current pandemic makes abundantly clear that the public availability of public knowledge indeed saves lives – but it doesn’t do so only now, it always does."
Flatten the curve, grow the care: What are we learning from Covid-19
Pirate Care
"This is a collective note-taking effort to document and learn from the organising of solidarity in response to the urgency of care precipitated by the pandemic of Coronavirus (SARS-Cov-2)."
punctum comms, Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei
To mitigate the sense of profound alienation and justified rage that may have descended upon many of us, punctum books offers a brief reading list of books that may serve as a potential way of reanchoring ourselves amid this avalanche of events and emotions.
e-Flux, Jonas Staal
"[T]he material propagation of the coronavirus makes visible a series of ideological propagations, both past and present, with severe real-life consequences. The question it lays bare is what alternative propagations can withstand the threat not just of the coronavirus, but of the far worse pandemics and system failures we will face in the climate catastrophes of the near future."
OBP
"In this list you'll find platforms and repositories that host Open Access content or help you to discover Open Access content (primarily books, because that's what we know most about)."
Moving a workshop online: what works and what doesn’t?
COPIM
As our project toward community-owned infrastructure for open access monographs continues to develop, we reflect on our first digital workshop.
Museum of Non-Humanity reviewed at Nordicum-Mediterraneum
Giorgio Baruchello
"In particular, however, persons keen on reflecting about penology, animal rights and bioethics, Finnish and colonial history, gender and minority studies, Holocaust studies, or the interplay between art and philosophy, can all find something stimulating in this volume, which is freely available worldwide on the internet as an e-book."