The Oa

The OA

Created by the team of Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij, and starring Marling in the role of Prairie Johnston, the Netflix Originals series The OA (2016-19) is a generically ambiguous vehicle for exploring a variety of themes, chief among them identity, belief and the nature and construction of reality. Prairie claims that she has learned the secret of inter-dimensional travel after a near-death experience and subsequent imprisonment at the hands of a deranged scientist obsessed with that phenomenon - but is she a potentially unreliable narrator, a sincere one or, finally, a metafictional character playing a version of herself in a fictional drama? This Constellation discusses The OA's thematic concerns in the context of the creators' earlier collaborations and in terms of influences on it, such as the work of David Lynch, particularly the TV series Twin Peaks (1990-2017) and the films Mulholland Drive (2001) and Inland Empire (2006), and comparable texts such as the Netflix Originals series Sense8 (2015-18) and Maniac (2018); the writings of Jorge Luis Borges and Philip K Dick. The discussion will be supported by sources from the fields of media and social theory, including the work of Jean Baudrillard, Steven Shaviro, Jodi Dean, Mark Fisher and Shoshana Zuboff. Negative criticisms of The OA will also be addressed, such as accusations of superficiality, which will be considered alongside the themes of deception, manipulation and artificiality identifiable in The OA specifically, and in Marling and Batmanglij's wider oeuvre.

Open Access

A concise introduction to the basics of open access, describing what it is (and isn't) and showing that it is easy, fast, inexpensive, legal, and beneficial. The Internet lets us share perfect copies of our work with a worldwide audience at virtually no cost. We take advantage of this revolutionary opportunity when we make our work “open access”: digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. Open access is made possible by the Internet and copyright-holder consent, and many authors, musicians, filmmakers, and other creators who depend on royalties are understandably unwilling to give their consent. But for 350 years, scholars have written peer-reviewed journal articles for impact, not for money, and are free to consent to open access without losing revenue. In this concise introduction, Peter Suber tells us what open access is and isn't, how it benefits authors and readers of research, how we pay for it, how it avoids copyright problems, how it has moved from the periphery to the mainstream, and what its future may hold. Distilling a decade of Suber's influential writing and thinking about open access, this is the indispensable book on the subject for researchers, librarians, administrators, funders, publishers, and policy makers.

Survey and Study of Administrative Organization, Procedure, and Practice in the Federal Agencies