Multimodal literacies and academic publishing: The eTalks

Academic publications and pedagogy have been deeply reconfigured by the emergence of a new kind of knowledge produced by multimodal literacies (text, image and sound together). Academic publishing needs a digital multimedia editing platform, that can be carefully edited and quoted in details, in the same way that printed sources are. Consequently, the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (Vital-IT, Lausanne, CH) is developing such a platform with the “eTalks”. The eTalks application is implemented via an easy-to-use editor interface, designed for the use of researchers themselves, to create and edit original eTalks. This permits the linking together of images, sounds and textual materials with hyperlinks, enriching it with relevant information. The final release of eTalks allows complete ‘citability’ of its contents: each and every portion of the researchers’ talks can be precisely referred to and thus cited with a specific identifier, just like any traditional, paper-based academic publication but with all the potential for plural literacies. It is openly accessible and the code is open source, including guidelines to install the eTalks. It is notably developed in collaboration with the Erasmus+ project #dariahTeach. The DRM (Digital Right Management) is a key issue in such an open access editing platform.