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ERIC Number: EJ838618
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2009-Mar-27
Pages: 1
Abstractor: ERIC
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0009-5982
EISSN: N/A
Humanities Journals Confront Identity Crisis
Howard, Jennifer
Chronicle of Higher Education, v55 n29 pA1 Mar 2009
Senior scholars, the A-list of academic publishing, seem to submit fewer unsolicited manuscripts to traditional humanities journals than they used to. The journal has become, with very few exceptions, the place where junior and midlevel scholars are placing their work. Technology and changing habits have called into question the nature of the traditional humanities journal--a printed assembly of peer-reviewed articles, reviews, and notes and queries offered by subscription. A journal started today, however, is likely to be online-only and open access. More and more readers now discover bits and pieces of any journal's content--an article here, a book review there--through electronic databases and aggregators like JStor, Project Muse, and Ebsco. Editors of well-established humanities journals have mixed feelings about the changes. They are not Luddites. They appreciate how digital access has expanded the audience for much of the work they publish. They see the possibilities that the Web presents for publishing and scholarship. Editors have also learned that the databases that deliver content to more readers can be a robust source of operating revenue because they work on a subscription model--which helps explain why many editors (or their publishers) have not yet embraced open access. More readers, more dollars: That makes editors happy. They worry about how to carry the idea of a journal as an organized whole over into the digital world. The journal itself becomes invisible to the end-user. Even as access to its content increases, the identity of the journal is often lost.
Chronicle of Higher Education. 1255 23rd Street NW Suite 700, Washington, DC 20037. Tel: 800-728-2803; e-mail: circulation@chronicle.com; Web site: http://chronicle.com/
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Descriptive
Education Level: Higher Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A