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FWD: All 22 years of our journal Oral Tradition are now available online and free of charge

Dear Colleagues,

      We are very pleased to notify you that all 22 years of our journal Oral Tradition are now available online and free of charge at
                        http://journal.oraltradition.org

     This site now contains nearly 500 articles and 10,000 pages, with all of the contents downloadable as pdf files that you can read online or print out as you wish. The entire electronic archive of Oral Tradition is also searchable by keyword or author name, with phrase-based and Boolean searches possible as well.

   In return, may we ask you to forward this e-mail announcement to at least five colleagues in your field? It would be especially helpful if you selected colleagues whom you feel might not be aware of Oral Tradition’s migration to an internet-based, open-access format, or who might not already know that the entire run of the journal is now available gratis.

   There are also several other ways to assist us with the process of notifying colleagues, and we would greatly appreciate your assistance: electronic links to the site in (1) personal blogs and (2) professional websites, as well as (3) announcements in journals and newsletters in your field. Any or all of these strategies would certainly help to get the news to colleagues on a broad scale.
  Thank you for whatever you can do to help inform our community and share a resource that was created for the common good.

     The Center for Studies in Oral Tradition at the University of Missouri (http://oraltradition.org) is gratified to be able to offer Oral Tradition to anyone worldwide with an internet connection and a browser. We hope that the online, open-access format will enlarge and diversify the journal’s readership, and particularly that it will offer everyone interested in the world’s oral traditions -regardless of their location and academic context-an equal opportunity to contribute actively to the discussion. Our shared field will prosper most readily if it operates as an academic democracy without financial or distributional barriers.

    As for future contents, the next issue of Oral Tradition (volume 22, number 2) will be a special collection devoted to Basque traditions, and will include descriptive and analytical articles, interviews with oral poets, and an eCompanion with photographic, audio, and video support. Beyond that issue we will be publishing articles on Albanian oral law, Native American storytelling, modern Greek oral poetry, Welsh saints ‘lives, modern Balinese epic, and many other topics across the international spectrum.

      We welcome your comments and especially your submissions for publication.


John Foley

Editor, Oral Tradition

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About Oral Tradition

History of the journal
OT was founded in 1986 to serve as an international and interdisciplinary forum for discussion of worldwide oral traditions and related forms. Since that time, and through the end of 2006, it has been published by Slavica Publishers, with an additional online edition through Project Muse from 2003 onward.

New, Universal Access
With the advent of eOT, the free, open-access electronic version of the journal based here, we aspire to remove many of the natural barriers created by print-based and subscription media. Since we believe that academic contributions should be as democratically available as possible, we are from this point onward offering the journal as a pro bono, gratis contribution to the field. Anyone with a connection to the internet will be able to read and redistribute its contents – not only the current issue, but also the entire 22 years and 10,000 pages of back issues.

In addition to reaching a much larger and more diverse readership, we hope that eOT will encourage submissions from scholars whose voices are not customarily heard in western print media because of the difficulties involved with currency exchange and distribution networks. Let me take this opportunity to offer a special invitation to non-western scholars to join the discussion by sending contributions for possible publication in this newly expanded forum for scholarly exchange. All materials should be transmitted electronically to John Miles Foley, Editor.

Publication details
We post OT on this website as a series of pdf (Adobe Acrobat) files in order to preserve formatting and diacritics accurately. If the computer you are using does not have Adobe Acrobat installed, you can download the free reader here. Files can be opened and read online, and can also be printed to produce hard copy. Additionally, you may redistribute any or all contents as you wish, with the sole condition that the original publication source is accurately cited. See the citation policy on this page.

The entire OT archve is searchable online by keyword and by author, so that readers seeking information on specific traditions or concepts can easily locate pertinent research. eCompanions, which contain photographs, audio, video, and other multimedia support for articles, are linked from within the individual article texts.

OT will continue to be a fully refereed academic journal, with all manuscripts reviewed by a specialist and a generalist before a decision is reached. Although the medium of publication has shifted, nothing in the process of evaluation will change. As before, we will attempt to have a decision within 90 days of receiving the manuscript.

For information on submitting a manuscript to OT, see Prospective Authors.

Citation policy
For the sake of accuracy and to help spread awareness of the electronic edition of the journal as widely as possible, we ask authors who quote or cite contents from OT to acknowledge the internet source via URL. A sample citation might read as follows: Burton Raffel, “The Manner of Boyan: Translating Oral Literature,” Oral Tradition, 1 (1986): 11-29 [eOT = http://journal.oraltradition.org/issues/1i/Raffel]

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