Medicine Anthropology Theory is an open-access and open licensed journal publishing scholarly articles, position pieces, reviews, and notes from the field related to the fields of:

• medical anthropology
• the anthropology of biomedicine
• critical global health studies
• medical humanities
• science and technology studies

MAT is hosted on the University Library’s Journal Hosting Service and is part of the University’s growing portfolio of fully open-access internationally-leading academic journals.

The journal is led by a collective of academic editors based at the Edinburgh Centre for Medical Anthropology (EdCMA).  For this guest post Charlie spoke to Dr Jessica Cooper, a Lecturer in Social Anthropology in the School of Social and Political Science and one of the editors for MAT.

Charlie Farley  
Could you provide a little bit of a background about Medicine Anthropology Theory Journal and where it came from?

Jessica Cooper  
Medicine Anthropology Theory, or MAT, came to the University of Edinburgh in 2019. For several decades it had been a project over at the University of Amsterdam, originally as a blog, becoming increasingly formalised, and in 2019 the editors at Amsterdam were looking to pass the project off. Due to the School of Social and Political Science’s strengths in medical anthropology and fellow travellers in our Edinburgh Centre for Medical Anthropology, we applied to take the journal on as a collective project and happily were selected. We started working on the project in 2019 and published our first issue in spring 2020.

Charlie Farley  
MAT is Open Access, which means it’s not behind a paywall so anyone can freely access and read it, it’s also open licenced for re-use of content. Was it always the plan to publish and license MAT in the open with Edinburgh Diamond?

Jessica Cooper  
Yes, that was part of the pitch, and it was absolutely mission critical to us that the entire enterprise remained open for readers. The reasons for that included reaching out to students who often didn’t have library access, reaching colleagues in parts of the world who also might not have massive corporate library subscriptions, we wanted to reach health care professionals around the world who also might not have library subscriptions. Most of our authors, and most of us on the Editorial Collective, undertake ethnographic research – meaning that many of us collaborate with clinicians in the course of our research. It was important to us that they be able to access our work, in printed form, to continue our research partnerships.

That meant that we needed to make sure that all our intellectual production was open.

Charlie Farley  
Is there student involvement in the journal?

Jessica Cooper  

Yes. Students and graduate students are sometimes exposed to the less friendly sides of academic publication. We work to ensure that at MAT that that is not the case and have mentorship components built into the work that we’re doing. Part of the benefit of being governed by a collective is that there are a few more hands on deck in terms of steering the ship and that allows us to go back and forth with authors. We have a wide swath of folks across professional life publishing with us.

 

More, students work with us! Our previous Managing Editor, Cristina Moreno Lozano, who helped us to get the journal off of the ground here in Edinburgh, and our present Managing Editor, Wren Wilson, are both PhD students at the University of Edinburgh. The Collective hopes that working with us in this capacity helps give our junior colleagues a sense of what goes on behind the scenes at a journal and gives them confidence in sending their own research out into the world for publication.

Charlie Farley
What involvement have Edinburgh Diamond had in supporting your publication of MAT?

Jessica Cooper  
One thing we’ve been surprised by is that taking on an Open Access project has meant a lot of technical learning. We’ve been really supported in that with by Edinburgh Diamond at the University Library.  They help us with all the technical aspects of publication and were essential in the migration from Amsterdam. They help us with the Open Journal Systems, the software that handles all of the backstage side of our review and publication processes; technical assistance; they run all our analytics; and importantly help us with indexing.
Indexing is important in making our journal available, better publicised, and helps the people we’re trying to publish when they’re applying for future grants or future positions. We simply could not have done this without them.

Charlie Farley  
What are the benefits for authors being published in an Open Access and Open Licensed journal?

Jessica Cooper  
I think it has to do with reach in terms of who will be able to read their work and in terms of building community. Open Access means that anyone will be able to read your scholarship. We want to build communities around the work that we publish – and those communities ought not be limited to who can pay a licensing fee. Most of the authors who publish in MAT have commitments to reaching out beyond the paywall. We’re proud to support researchers in this mission.

Charlie Farley  

Has the open licencing aspect of the publishing added to or complicated the editing process at all?

Jessica Cooper
In terms of the open licencing, it’s been smooth sailing. Most of our images are usually what people have taken themselves during field work and they are happy to put the images, like the text they are providing, under an open license.

Charlie Farley  
Is there anything that I’ve not asked that you want to let people know about the journal?

Jessica Cooper  
Just to check us out, go to our website and look at what we’re doing! You can find us at http://www.medanthrotheory.org We’re proud of the work that we do in the interdisciplinary space of health and wellness across the social sciences and humanities. We’ve put together some fascinating collections and collections from guest editors. We’re really proud that it’s open and available to anybody who would like to read it.