I love being a scholar, but one thing that really depresses me about research is that so much of what scholars produce is rendered inaccessible to so many people who might find it valuable, inspiring, or thought-provoking. This is at the root of what drives my commitment to open-access. When Zizi Papacharissi asked Nancy Baym and I if we’d be willing to guest edit the Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media (JOBEM), we agreed under one condition: the issue had to be open-access (OA). Much to our surprise and delight, Taylor and Francis agreed to “test” that strange and peculiar OA phenomenon by allowing us to make this issue OA.

Nancy and I decided to organize the special issue around “socially mediated publicness,” both because we find that topic to be of great interest and because we felt like there was something fun about talking about publicness in truly public form. We weren’t sure what the response to our call would be, but were overwhelmed with phenomenal submissions and had to reject many interesting articles.

But we are completely delighted to publish a collection of articles that we think are timely, interesting, insightful, and downright awesome. If you would like to get a sense of the arguments made in these articles, make sure to check out our introduction. The seven pieces in this guest-edited issue of JOBEM are:

• “Socially Mediated Publicness: An Introduction” by Nancy Baym and danah boyd
• “Knock, Knock. Who’s There? The Imagined Audience” by Eden Litt
• “Facework on Facebook: The Online Publicness of Juvenile Delinquents and Youths-at-Risk” by Sun Sun Lim, Shobha Vadrevu, Yoke Hian Chan & Iccha Basnyat
• “The Digital Storyteller’s Stage: Queer Everyday Activists Negotiating Privacy and Publicness” by Sonja Vivienne & Jean Burgess
• “‘There Isn’t Wifi in Heaven!’ Negotiating Visibility on Facebook Memorial Pages” by Alice Marwick & Nicole B. Ellison
• “Hypermasculinity & Dickwolves: The Contentious Role of Women in the New Gaming Public” by Anastasia Salter & Bridget Blodgett
• “Secretly Political: Civic Engagement in Online Publics in Kazakhstan” by Irina Shklovski & Bjarki Valtysson

We hope that you’ll find them fun to read and that you’ll share them with others that might enjoy them too!