Sandra Tarabochia
October 1, 2023
Sandra Tarabochia is an associate professor of English in Rhetoric and Writing Studies at the University of Oklahoma. She is currently an editor of the online open access journal Writers: Craft & Context, published in partnership with the University of Oklahoma Libraries on the Open Journal Systems (OJS) platform.
Dr. Tarabochia is the author of Reframing the Relational: A Pedagogical Ethic for Crosscurricular Literacy Work, published in the CCC/NCTE series Studies in Writing & Rhetoric. You can listen to an interview with Dr. Tarabochia about her book here. She co-edited the collection Diverse Approaches to Teaching, Learning, and Writing Across the Curriculum: WAC at 25, published with WAC Clearinghouse. Scholarship based on her ongoing longitudinal study of faculty writers can be found in Writing & Pedagogy, Composition Forum, Composition Studies, Written Communication, and Peitho.
Dr. Tarabochia is one of few researchers to use poetic inquiry, an arts-based research methodology, to study the lives of writers. She facilitated poetic inquiry workshops at the 2021 Watson Conference and 2022 International Congress on Qualitative Inquiry and has a chapter on poetic inquiry forthcoming in Improvisations: Methods and Methodologies in Lifespan Writing Research, the first book in a series sponsored by the Writing Through the Lifespan Collaborative.
How much did you know about open access publishing before you started publishing openly?
When I started as a tenure-track faculty member, I was steered toward certain journals and publishers because print was then perceived as required for scholarly credibility. I knew very little about open access publishing before publishing openly, but I finally submitted to open access venues because they were the best fit for my work and featured the scholarly conversations I was most excited to join. I soon discovered my open access publications generated more traffic, energy, and connection than my print publications. Colleagues from the across the country reached out to tell me how an article I wrote resonated with them days, sometimes hours after it was published openly. They were eager to circulate my work among their networks and assign it in graduate courses, which was easy to do with open access scholarship. Now I purposefully seek out open access journals for my work.
Why did you choose to make your journal, Writers: Craft & Context, an open access journal?
Why did you choose to make your journal, Writers: Craft & Context, an open access journal?
My fellow co-editors—Aja Martinez (University of North Texas) and Michele Eodice (formerly OU)—and I agreed from the start that our Writers: Craft & Context journal (WCCJ) would be an open access journal because open access publishing aligns with our vision for the journal and our values as editors. WCCJ is an interdisciplinary journal that publishes a wide array of material focused on writers: the work they do, the contexts in which they compose and circulate their work, how they are impacted by policies and pedagogies (broadly conceived), and how they develop across the lifespan. We invite contributions from a range of academic fields as well as from community experts outside academia, including program leaders, activists, volunteers, artists, and others who see, support, and do the work of writing in non-academic contexts. Because our subject matter, style, and audience are so wide ranging and diverse, open access is essential.
Moreover, we are committed to inclusive publishing, which means publishing new voices and approaches to sharing expertise, experience, and research; encouraging accessible forms of writing that embody diverse sources of knowledge; sponsoring engaged discourse among members of the editorial and review teams and readers and writers; and building long-term mentoring and collaborative relationships across disciplinary, institutional, and community boundaries (see the WCCJ website for more about our commitments). Open access publishing enables us to activate these inclusive, transformative values every day. We attract readers and potential contributors who are hungry for cutting edge content and novel ways of composing not found in mainstream publications. Without the constraints of print journals, we can work creatively with authors to realize their visions for multi-genre, multi-modal compositions (see We Read Your Letter and Abandon This Palace of Language for examples). Because we are not bound by cycles of print journals, we can be flexible with writers and reviewers, and our own needs as editors, as we all live messy human lives. We can take the time to foster meaningful mentorship and deep relationships among an ever-widening network of people contributing in myriad ways to the journal and the community it engenders.
What advice would you give to a scholar who is considering establishing an open access journal?
Go for it! In my experience, the possibilities are boundless with open access publishing. Instead of contending with traditional limitations, your time and energy are focused on “how can we make (X new idea) happen?” As you make the move toward open access editing/publishing, take the time to gather a committed, ambitious, innovative team willing to embrace uncertainty, think outside the box, and take problem-solving in stride. The OU Libraries Publishing Services team has encouraged and embraced this spirit from the moment we brought them the seed of an idea for Writers: Craft & Context. They welcomed every wild vision, new challenge, and outrageous “what if…” we brought to the table. This kind of collaboration is one of many benefits to open access publishing. If you want to produce a dynamic, accessible, widely circulated product and experience intellectual stimulation and joy in the process, make the leap and pursue an open access journal.