Nudged by my colleague, John BATEMAN, whose enthusiasm for multimodality has been growing ever bigger lately, I decided to hop on the bandwagon of the open-access caravan a while ago. Frontiers seems to spearhead this movement with its dominating presence and breath-taking speed (that kills – what/who?). I am editing what Frontiers calls a ‚research topic‘ (RT) in a section of Frontiers in Communication, called Multimodality of Communications. The RT is labelled Multimodal Coherence across Media and Genres and has already produced a couple of papers, while others are still waiting to see the light of day.
Working as an editor for Frontiers has given me many serious headaches. Some have to do with the irreconcilable conflict between personal and machine-made communications. Others stem from the sheer flood of unnerving emails the system generates. Yet others, the splitting ones, are caused by my worries about what this emerging fast-track publishing with its half-baked philosophies and practices will do to the culture of established journals and other kinds of ‚old-fashioned‘ media. Whichever way we respond to these manifold issues, it is clear that Frontiers still needs to go a long way towards a reasonable quality of their editorial processes.
I am happy to have produced my own paper on Frontiers (a piece on annotating a corpus of print ads for multimodal coherence), co-authored with my favorite colleague Jana PFLAEGING. We are glad to have received funding by Salzburg University (and by implication the Austrian state) to be able to pay the horrendous publication fees for a 12.000-word paper. We are very grateful for this generous support and acknowledge this here. Editing this paper has been particularly laborious and I take the opportunity, on behalf of my colleague, to thank everyone with whom I had the pleasure of discussing points raised in the paper.
Prof. Dr. Hartmut Stöckl 