Federico Pianzola's (Faculty of Arts) monograph Digital Social Reading: Sharing Fiction in the Twenty-First Century was published open access for free through MIT Press’s Direct to Open (D2O) programme, which the UG proudly sponsors. The book also underwent open peer review, making it a great example of best practice in open science. We spoke with Federico about the project, the publishing process, and the broader value of openness in academic research.

Why did you choose MIT Press as a publisher?

The reasons are mainly two, one related to the topic and methods of my research and the other related to the possibility of publishing in open access with no fees for the author. My work uses computational methods to investigate online publishing and reading practices, so I needed a publisher that would allow me to develop a humanistic argument intersecting several disciplines related to books, media formats, and social media. At the same time, I needed to support my argument with empirical findings and computational analysis, including some statistics. This is not so common, but MIT Press had already published a book that did something similar (Writers in the Secret Garden), so I thought they would be open-minded enough to accept my proposal. And indeed they were.

Regarding open access, I’ve been a strong advocate for the open science movement since the days of my Master’s studies in Italy, so I have strong opinions about scholarly publishing. I wanted my book to be freely readable by everybody and I knew this was feasible. Even my previous monograph about Primo Levi was published in open access by Ledizioni, an innovative Italian publisher. MIT’s Direct to Open Programme was very appealing, beside the prestige associated with publishing with MIT Press, which I think was needed at my career stage. Additionally, I read a few scholarly books that experimented with open peer review, including two published by MIT Press. I wanted to try something similar myself in order to make the book immediately available to the scholarly community, without waiting for the whole editorial process to be completed, but also considering that my book talks about peer-to-peer feedback that readers of amateur fiction give to each other.

“I’ve been a strong advocate for the open science movement since the days of my Master’s studies in Italy, so I have strong opinions about scholarly publishing. I wanted my book to be freely readable by everybody and I knew this was feasible.”

The book was published open access via MIT’s Direct to Open Programme for free (no cost to the author). Can you describe how the process worked?

The process is fairly simple. As part of the standard contract that MIT Press sends to authors, there’s a clause stating “Subject to the availability of funding, we also agree to post an electronic edition of the Work on an MIT Press website, under a Creative Commons [CC-BY-NC] license.” You will notice that my book has a CC-BY-SA (Share Alike, instead of Non Commercial), because I expressly asked for it. It still protects the publisher from commercial reuse but it's more friendly for educators, who can use the content of my book for teaching, even though they offer it as part of paid educational programs.

When discussing the contract (because an author should always know their rights and discuss the publishing contract!), they clarified that the funding for the MIT’s Direct to Open program comes from participating libraries, but if I had access to my own funding for OA, I should have let them know. I knew that the University of Groningen is a sponsoring member of the program, so I told them and I didn’t have to pay anything from my own funds. 

The book underwent open review. How did you experience this process?

First of all, it’s worth mentioning that open peer review is not something unheard of in the humanities. Scholarly books I’ve read during the open peer review phase are:

• Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling (2012) by Jason Mittell, https://mcpress.media-commons.org/complextelevision/

• Annotation (2019) by Remi Kalir and Antero Garcia, https://mitpressonpubpub.mitpress.mit.edu/annotation

• Data Feminism (2020) by Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein, https://data-feminism.mitpress.mit.edu

"Even though it wasn't very helpful for me, [the open peer review process] has been tremendously helpful for many of my colleagues to be able to access my book online... During these four years my ideas were already circulating, being cited in articles, and used in teaching. I think this has been a choice that also greatly helped my career, because my work had more time to get known by others."

From the publishing perspective, I understand that MIT Press has two ways of handling open peer review: some books have their own web page (like Annotation and Data Feminism), some others are published on the platform Works in Progress, like mine. The underlying infrastructure is the same, the PubPub content management system. Based on the considerations I mentioned before about open scholarly publishing, I approached MIT Press saying that I was interested in doing open peer review of a book I was writing. They offered me to use the Works in Progress platform, which requires a payment of around 600 euros for the publication process. I went for this and the first draft of my book was online one week after I submitted it, available to everybody.

Regarding the review process, I have to admit that it was not very successful: I received very few comments. By studying the phenomenon of digital social reading, I realized this is not an anomaly. In order for this kind of asynchronous commenting to work, it needs to be organized according to a shared schedule and with a core group of readers committed to posting comments that can trigger the discussion. Anyway, even though it wasn’t very helpful for me, it has been tremendously helpful for many of my colleagues to be able to access my book online. Consider that the first draft was published online in March 2021 and the print version was published in January 2025. During these four years my ideas were already circulating, being cited in articles, and used in teaching. I think this has been a choice that also greatly helped my career, because my work had more time to get known by others.

Note that at the same time of open peer review, my manuscript also underwent the usual blind peer review, managed by MIT Press. I received comments from three anonymous reviewers and my assigned editor that helped me greatly improve the book. You can see that the draft version and the final published version have a different structure and there have been some cuts and expansions to the content. 

The code and the data for the book is openly available on GitHub. Is sharing research data and code a standard practice in your field?

I work in the area called Digital Humanities, where programming and statistics expertise varies a lot, so there is no consensus or mandatory policies for the sharing of code, because this would harm the inclusivity of scholars who don’t have the expertise to prepare reproducible code or are simply not confident enough to openly share their code. My impression is that the majority of the more technical branches of Computational Humanities acknowledge the importance of openly sharing code and even research protocols, and they do so, either on GitHub or Zenodo.

More generally, there is a widespread institutional encouragement to embrace open science practices, namely oriented by initiatives by DARIAH, the European Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities. For example, the topic of the first issue of the new journal Transformations: A DARIAH Journal was “Workflows: Digital Methods for Reproducible Research Practices in the Arts and Humanities”. And we also have the Journal of Open Humanities Data (JOHD), which is celebrating its 10-year anniversary. Another amazing initiative, not necessarily related to computational analysis, is the Post45 Data Collective, a peer-reviewed, open-access repository for literary and cultural data from 1945 to the present. It publishes extremely valuable data that can be used to enrich the qualitative analysis of literary and social phenomena.

So, there are examples of good practices and incentives given by the recognition of published data and code. We teach this to our students of the MA in Digital Humanities and I hope to see more and more colleagues doing so in the future. 

In what ways do you think making the book open access influences how it is accessed and reused?

As mentioned, it was cited and taught for three years pre-publication. The online version on PubPub in print. The online version on PubPub allows for the easy citation of specific sections and paragraphs, so that people can directly link to the content they’re citing, if they wish, making it easier for others to read it in context.