General information
On this page you can propose books, articles, course outlines, endorsements and reviews to be published on this site.
Below you will find a description of the information we need to add new information to the site. We welcome contributions and ideas: if you would like to recommend a book, leave an endorsement, or contribute a course outline, please send your submission to us at info@radicaldemon.org and we will add it, if it is appropriate for this site.
This site is still under development. At present only site administrators can add material such as outlines. In due course, this site will have facilities for authors and publishers to enter submissions directly.
Zotero and bibliographic references
A major purpose of this site is to help readers, writers, and librarians find out as much as they can about the books described on it. To this end we work with the Zotero community, which allows bibliographic information to be captured from the web and to be shared between communities of users. To make full use of this site, we recommend that you join the Radical Demon group on Zotero. You will see that for each of our books and articles, a link is provided for a Zotero entry. This will normally be the corresponding Zotero entry that is stored in the group library. You can access this without joining the group, but we encourage you to sign up for the group, because this will allow you to make new entries there, and to improve the quality of the existing entries.
When you submit a book, article, or outline, we encourage you to take the extra time out to locate or create a Zotero entry for it. This is easily done once you have installed Zotero, since most publishers now provide bibliographic information suitable for Zotero. Once you locate the entry for the work you want to cite on a publisher website, or on Amazon, click on the small Zotero icon that you will usually find in the toolbar. This will place the citation information into you local library. Provided you create a web library, and follow the instructions on the Zotero help system to synchronise your local library with it, this entry can then easily be copied from there into the group library.
Submitting an article
An article is any piece of text that is cited in the course of explaining or developing an idea. It is something you need to read, if you want to understand the history and the theory behind the idea.
Academic articles are often published in professional journals or books. These are important sources of information, but journals and editors often act as gatekeepers, ensuring that the only proposals published are those they either agree, or which offer no threat to them.
Academic institutions - like journals - depend, directly or indirectly, on funding that is either given, or policed, by corporate and other wealthy private interests. Even when nominally independent, as anyone will know who has watched the superb movie ‘Inside Job’ they are shaped from the top down by mechanisms which give the final say to the 1%. A hierarchy or ‘diamond list’ of journals in most professions and disciplines rewards conformity with publication, bringing recognition, access to funding, promotion, and career security. The outcome of this subtly corrupt system is now fairly plain to see: the theories and ideas that we get from the recognised journals and institutions, with the exception of the work of a small number of courageous individuals, have proven absolutely inadequate for those who want to understand what is now happening in the world.
This site sets a different standard: scholarly quality. We will promote books, and articles, which take the trouble to check the evidence, examine alternatives, look critically at the assumptions that underlie the propositions they discuss, and not least, take into account the material circumstances which produce these propositions. We do not ‘take sides’; you will not find works on this site that are chosen for being progressive, liberal, or which accord with what we think or believe. You will find works that draw your attention to facts, and ideas, and criticisms, that you will not find without a great deal of effort in conventional scholarly media.
This site is not intended for new work. It includes only works that have been published elsehwere. Before you submit an article to this site ensure that you have the following information to hand
- The title of the article
- The author
- The year of publication
- Where it was published - either a journal or book in which it appeared, or the name of a website it appeared in
- Ideally, unless copyright restrictions apply, the URL of a location it can be downloaded from
If you have an electronic copy of the article, you can also submit that and it will be placed on the site so it can be downloaded. You must have explicit permission to re-publish it.