Why An Electronic Journal in History and Computing? (Editorial)

Jeffrey G. Barlow

This is the editor's statement of the origins and intended purpose of the Journal of the Association for History and Computing. It is adapted from a paper presented at the 1998 conference of the American Association for History and Computing, held in Cincinnati April 24-26, 1998.

.01. Introduction: Comes the Millennium...

One of the defining characteristics of millennial thinking is the apprehension that unprecedented and possibly apocalyptic changes are about to occur. While historians are eager to put such thinking into a properly sober context, we are perhaps less able to evaluate quite so objectively those changes which seem to threaten us. At present some scholars are predicting even the time when "...The old act of slowly reading a serious book becomes an elegiac exercise."  [1] Somewhat less alarmist ones yet fear that electronic communication exposes us to baleful, possibly demonic, influences: "Has the unregulated culture of the Internet made cyberspace a bloated refuge for work of questionable value that otherwise couldn’t—and shouldn’t—see of the light of day?"  [2] Within this scholarly discourse, the founding of an electronic journal (E-journal) such as this one requires some justification. There are many, I am aware, who think of the conversion from paper journals (P-journals) to electronic forms of scholarly communication as a plague which might, with adequate scholarly invocations, yet be turned aside. At the JAHC we think not; the change is upon us, and it is as necessary as it was inevitable. We believe that an E-journal in the linked fields of history and computing is necessary and that E-journals in general can enable the scholarly community to achieve those ends for which P-journals were originally created.

.02 The History of P-journals

The story of the evolution of scholarly journals from their beginnings to their present form is instructive. Valauskas  [3] suggests the following as a useful schema for understanding the relationship between varying forms of media and the communication of ideas:

• From the 1470’s through the 1660’s: The book was the main form of scholarly communications.
• From the 1660’s through to the present: The journal became the main form. This was not a smooth progression, but accelerated rapidly in the 19th century.
• In the last five years, a migration to computers has occurred; whether this is a new stage or an ancillary development of the previous stage remains to be seen.

The medium of the second stage, the scholarly journal, began as a means of transmitting the proceedings of learned societies to members, and to serve archival purposes.  [4] One can assume that the process of editing and publishing also served quality control functions similar to today’s peer review. The first of these publications is believed to have been that of the Italian Academica dei Lincei in 1609.  [5] Guedon argues that this development was more than a new form for ideas; journal publication changed the nature of writing itself: "writing evolved into a virtual discussion space." Guedon’s argument is a very interesting one. He believes that prior to the development of the journal, libraries were places where established knowledge—"the canon"—was stored. But this knowledge appeared to spring from no particular continuous scholarly process or foundation—each work asserted a truth with scant references to other works. Journals now begin to focus upon the continuous process of constructing knowledge and the canon would never be the same. Guedon sees this process as ensuring "the victory of the Moderns over the Ancients."  [6] —Wisdom was no longer received but constructed by scholars amid debate and discussion.

Fytton Rowland, a very thoughtful skeptic with regard to the future of E-journals, believes that academic journals properly have four functions:

1. Dissemination of information
2. Quality control
3. Canonical archives
4. Recognition of authors  [7]

In their early origins, academic journals served only the first three of these functions. But with the development of major universities, particularly in the United States in the late 19th and 20th centuries, the journal began to serve its fourth function, one which many would argue has become its main function: the granting of peer recognition and reward. As Page Smith puts it, publications have become "certification tools" used to judge promotion. [8]

Harnad, whose enthusiastic support of E-journals places him at the opposite pole from Rowland, argues for a different developmental scheme for the production of knowledge:

• First revolution in the production of knowledge: the development of spoken language.
• Second revolution: the creation of written language.
• Third revolution: the development of moveable type.
• Fourth revolution: the development of electronic communications. [9]

Harnad’s position provides a suitably apocalyptic perspective on the E-journal, for it is precisely the possibility that the potential changes occasioned by a switch from P-journals to E-journals are revolutionary which has given rise to the very heated debate over the relative merits of the two forms. Whether either the more moderate Valauskas or the more extreme Harnad are correct in their judgment of the significance of electronic communication remains to be seen. We are clearly in a period of some turmoil; whether it is a transition or "bridging" period as Willis puts it  [10] or merely a period in which the P-journal may be supplemented but not supplanted by the E-journal cannot now be known.

There can be no question, however, that P-journals are extremely important to the scholarly world as it is now constituted. One study suggests that "an average scholar scans seven journals and reads three to five articles a week," and that scholars spend ten to twelve hours each week with books and journals. [11] —a considerable amount of time spent with P-Journals.

There are available estimates of the increasing importance of E-journals, and of time spent by academics in electronic communications in general, but these remain preliminary and impressionistic.  [12] Hobohm speculates that as of 1997, perhaps 5-10% of scholarly journals were electronic.  [13]

Part of the difficulty in assessing the growth of E-journals is the issue of definitions. A supposed archive of E-journals in my field, Asian Studies, turned up a listing of 138 "E-journals."  [14] However, scanning a number of them it became evident that many if not most of the entries referred not to E-journals but to electronic references to P-journals, indexes, newsletters and other ephemera. For our purposes, an academic or scholarly E-journal must be peer-reviewed. One authoritative source, the Electronic Journals List, references 354 peer reviewed E-journals in the category of "Scientific, Technical, Medical," and 80 peer-reviewed E-journals in "Humanities."  [15] We argue below that our field, History and Computing, has characteristics which in fact place it into the former category rather than the latter, insofar as electronic journals are concerned.

It is evident that there is a substantial growth in the number of E-journals. Given the importance of P-journals, however, it is obvious that, if a movement away from them is occurring, as I believe, such changes must stem from very powerful, even fundamental forces.

.03. Why the Conversion from Paper to Bytes is Occurring

Those who most fear this conversion tend to see it as primarily due to a reckless enthusiasm for superficially appealing electronic media, an enthusiasm perhaps caused by television and hence related in some manner to popular cultural manifestations such as Beavis and Butthead, or perhaps more appropriately, the Titanic phenomenon— all due, anyway, to a shortening of the human attention span and a diminishing of critical faculties. But the cause lies within academia. We have taken certain of our practices to such extremes that key institutions are on the verge of collapse. We look to new forms because we must, not out of an appetite for novelty.

One of these extreme practices is an increasingly untenable gap between the production of knowledge and the consumption of it. Just as the world-wide economy faces the specter of inadequate effective demand, so do we. As Arnold puts it, we simply "produce...too much stuff."  [16] In 1951, there were roughly ten thousand P-journals published. Now there are about 140,000.  [17] The numbers of both students and faculty—the audience for these journals— have increased as well, of course, but by far less than a factor of 14 times.

The cost of producing these journals, or at least of subscribing to them, has also rocketed. Some scientific journals have doubled in price in less than five years.  [18] One estimate has it that the actual cost of preparing the median journal article may be as high as four thousand dollars. [19]

Given the increasing cost of library collections and their continually accelerating size, many college and university libraries have simply ceased attempting to maintain the traditional standards for collections; even in the most financially flush times, few institutions could keep up. And even if they could, to do so would not necessarily be a wise investment. Librarians are aware that eighty percent of the works in circulation come from but twenty percent of the collections.  [20] We also know that half or more of publications in some fields are never cited in an additional publication; they are scholarly roads which lead nowhere.  [21]

The universities are increasingly in a paradoxical position. We provide both the labor—essentially unpaid—to produce the content of journals, then turn around and provide the market for them at great cost to ourselves. Some of these profits accrue, of course, to our own presses, but at present university presses provide only sixteen percent of the titles published; a small figure, but one yet far larger than our share of the profits: two percent.  [22] The remaining 98% goes largely to commercial publishers who, in effect, sell us the product of our own labors.

The actual costs of our journal publications are concealed in many ways in our academic institutions. In the past, when money seemed to flow relatively freely, this presented no particular difficulty. It is estimated now, however, that the average cost of library support at research universities is as high as $12,000 per faculty member, and far higher at some elite institutions.  [23] And declining resources, have, of course, forced us to confront many unpleasant null-sum choices.

These rising costs have had some very untoward consequences which themselves further undermine the current system. Increasingly, university presses are asking fewer questions about the scholarly value of content, and more and more pointed ones about their market value. Herbert S. Bailey argued in June of 1987, in an address on "The Future of University Press Publishing" to the American Association of University Professors, that there might be developing a tendency to steer away from dangerous topics; economic conditions could affect the mix of what was published.  [24] I think that the personal experience of many of us demonstrates that this tendency has become the dominant reality.

This problem particularly affects the humanities, because, as Arnold points out, we are probably much more dependent upon university presses for the dissemination of our work than are most other fields:

In addition, commercial considerations are now influencing even previously authorial prerogatives such as when we as historians may use foot-notes.  [26] The need to find sizable audiences for increasingly more numerous and ever more narrow scholarly works threatens the university presses and impacts the entire apparatus of tenure and promotion which is closely tied to academic publication.  [27]

These factors, and many more which could be discussed, have meant that we had to either cut back on scholarly output or find a method whereby it can be disseminated far more cheaply. It is clear that this will involve various forms of electronic publication, including electronic databases, bundled electronic journals, CD-ROM's, and web-based E-journals.

.04 Arguments Against E-journals

If this transition to E-journals is irreversible, for the reasons discussed above, there are nonetheless many problems which must be solved. Some issues, however, are more emotional than real. Increasingly the one we most encounter is a sort of primal wail which in effect says "But I love books—their feel, their smell, their convenience, etc., etc." And so do we all. But almost every book, journal, and paper published in the last two decades began as a collection of bytes. These bytes, at some point, were transformed to hard-copy, to paper, and bound in one of many possible forms. It seems to me that all of the arguments in favor of the continued existence of books can be simply resolved: if you prefer paper to bytes, print the bytes out—but only when you need to do so. That is what I did for the research I undertook for this piece—as a glance at the bibliography shows, much of the research was done on the web; the articles were saved to disk and subsequently printed to paper for convenience in reading and writing. I find them, if anything, much more convenient than I do the P-journal articles and books with which I am also working. I have been able to print them out in a font size appropriate to my needs, and they lie pleasantly flat as I read them. Having little invested in them, I can throw them out when I am finished with them, or file them, as I choose.

The process of rendering bytes into paper could easily be much more systematized in our lives. A series of very rough calculations based on current costs in our divisional offices have persuaded me that I could easily download an entire book of about 300 pages from the internet and print it out at a cost of about US$ 4.00 in paper and printer expenses.  [28] Our library at Pacific University figures that the cost of purchasing, cataloguing, and shelving a university press publication amounts to fifty dollars per item. Surely, someplace between our printing costs of $4. and the library cost of $50.00, there is a figure which would let us print out books whenever we chose, pay a profit to all concerned, then, if we wished, either shelve or recycle the "book." In short, turn bytes into books if you wish to do so, the love of the physical form of books is quite irrelevant to this debate. Neither does it matter whether books are easier to read than a CRT, easier to carry than a notebook computer, last longer than a floppy disk, etc.; print the bytes in the font of your choice on the paper of your choice and bind them in the method of your choice. Any combination of bizarre choices is still going to be far cheaper than the cost of printing any particular new volume. And from a library’s perspective, printing books on demand, presuming adequate support processes, would be far cheaper than purchasing books that are rarely if ever used.

The foregoing is, of course, something of a specious argument. There are not adequate numbers of books available on the web at present, certainly not the ones we need. But the books could be on the web far more easily and far more cheaply than they can be produced, bound, and shipped to the remainder bins at our locally beloved Powell’s Books. And compared to reconstructing the current system of rewards in academia, working out methods to produce them electronically and print them upon demand will be relatively simple. Some, like Clifford Stoll, fear that any such arrangements as these will undercut schools and libraries.  [29] Of course it will change them, but no reason why it should destroy them is apparent.

A very broad spectrum of arguments against publishing in E-journals rather than in paper deals with the issue of control—related but not absolutely congruent with the issue of quality. The control issue runs throughout the special edition "New Technologies and the Practice of History" in Perspectives, the newsletter of the American Historical Association. It is astonishing the number of times and the many guises in which this issue arises in the various articles in this publication. One scholar, Tomlins, confronts it head on and points out that this is an old problem in our guild: J. Franklin Jameson, the first editor of The American Historical Review, wrote in 1902 that the AHR’s most important task was "to regularize, to criticize, to restrain vagaries, to set a standard of workmanship and compel men to conform to it." [30]

Very much simplified, the control argument simply holds that electronic publishing is too easy, the web contains a great deal of chaff—to many, it is all chaff. Tomlins puts it very succinctly when he states that the most valuable product of a journal is "certified information."  [31] This is a most important point, and one which must not be lost in the shuffle from paper to E-journals. It is vitally important that the standards of excellence for academic journals of merit be reproduced in their E-version: work must be refereed by a double-blind system, rigorously edited and proofed. This issue, however, should be seen for what it is: an argument that scholarly sources should continue to meet rigorous scholarly standards, (though I will argue below that there are times when these standards should be relaxed).

But let us separate the quality issue from the control issue: we cannot contain the world wide web within the old paradigm; my students, at least, will publish whatever they want to, within legal bounds, of course. Given the inability of our guild to come together around issues like the Smithsonian’s Enola Gay exhibit, the fight over national history standards and other issues, there would seem to be little danger of us agreeing on rigid standards to preclude certain kinds of historical arguments on the web. So let us hone our teaching of critical skills so that our students can better distinguish good history from bad.

There is another facet to the issue of control. Some historians fear we are in danger of losing control over vital developments to outsiders. Quoting again from Perspectives, from Minner’s discussion of the recent "Conference on History Journals and the Electronic Future:"

We have an old saw in our field, stated as "Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it." Our loss of technological control to others might be a case of "Those who resist history are doomed to be swept along willy-nilly." But there is a problem here. We have ignored developments in this field to the point where, with some exceptions dealing essentially with quantifications of one sort or another, we find ourselves looking with longing at the great tools with which the other academics, notably the scientists, get to work. Eventually some few of us manage to adapt such tools for our own purposes, but for the most part we seem to be endlessly celebrating some new CD-ROM-based program which upon close examination doesn’t really run all that well in any event. [33]

So far as E-journals go, the scientists have been using variations upon them for some time. The most frequently cited example of conspicuous success is Paul Ginsparg’s pre-print server in high energy physics which distributed twenty thousand scientific papers per year as of 1997—it is probably much higher as of this writing. [34] Ginsparg’s operation is, as Odlyzko points out, not truly a journal but a preprint archive, and its success is possible only in fields such as high energy physics  [35] which change so quickly that ideas are too old to be useful by the time they can see actual print. This quality is not usually characteristic of the field of history. However, because of the speed with which electronic resources are developing, it is characteristic of the allied fields of history and computing. It is for this reason, among others, that we believe an electronic journal in History and Computing is not only necessary, but should be successful as well.

But once again, there is a real problem here. Many historians who have begun to work more with computers both in their research and in their classes have probably had experiences similar to my own. As my classes become increasingly web-based, I find myself squabbling with some scientists (others, notably those in computer science, have been very supportive) who were outraged at sharing what they had come to think of as "their" facilities since no humanist had yet darkened the precincts before I hesitantly entered. Kenneth Arnold points out that humanities programs lack equipment (relative to the sciences) and because of the different ways information is used, inevitably will lag behind the sciences in their use and possession of electronic information systems. [36]

But this argument, like the other elements of the control argument, can be resolved if we in turn choose to shape our own future rather than attempt to resist change. There are other obstacles which must be overcome if E-journals in history are to be successful, and I have elsewhere discussed in some detail additional arguments which hold that the move from print to bytes is undesirable. [37]

05. Advantages of the Conversion from Paper to Bytes

As is implied in the arguments above, a primary advantage of an E-journal over a paper one, everything else being equal, is the far lower cost. Others believe that in fact E-journals are not going to be that much cheaper,  [38] but this argument is increasingly being resolved very much in the favor of E-journals. [39] While there is certainly some cost to an E-journal, it is less than that of preparing a paper journal by an order of many magnitudes. And, being cheaper, the circulation of an E-journal can be far wider. It should also be the case that E-journals will much more easily find a "cross-over" audience than paper journals, usually read largely by members of that particular field. An example of this latter phenomenon would be the research I have done for this paper: many of the journals which were most useful to me were well outside my usual research parameters and were it not for the ease of doing searches upon the web, I would never have turned them up. And the fact that many of them were "anchored" or "linked" electronically to still other relevant articles and journals expanded my search exponentially.

Another example of the potential audience for E-journal articles comes from a web cluster in Asian Studies which I operate, thanks to the generosity of the Matsushita Corporation. [40] A senior thesis in history done by one of last year’s graduates on the topic of the Korean War has had a total of 15,425 visitors since it was first "posted" in June of 1997—more than fifty per day every day.  [41] And the audience is a very involved, interactive one—it is now a rare day that the author does not receive a comment or a query from some visitor. I suppose there may be articles in paper journals done by superstars in our field which have attracted this same number of closely involved readers (though I very much doubt that they are on the topic of the Korean War), but if so, I am unaware of them. Total audience is, of course, quite different from "scholarly impact," a distinction which we shall explore below.

But the ability for author and audience to interact, while not a measure of scholarly impact, is nonetheless a legitimate advantage of the web. Rowland, the most skeptical of the scholars cited here, concludes by pointing out that the electronic networks have "democratized the invisible college"  [42] by which he means that the community composed of those who can now participate in scholarly communications is infinitely larger than it was in the "paper" days. James O’Donnell, in a very useful recounting of his experience in taking the Brywn Mawr Classical Review from P-journal to E-journal, also refers to the construction of community: "We are creating a community of interest and discourse among classicists that has never existed before." [43]

Another advantage of the E-journal is the greater depth of understanding which can be conveyed via multimedia. We are, I feel, only at the beginning of our ability to utilize in our scholarly communications some of the inherent features of electronic information. As Steven Johnson puts it: "Every major technological age attracts a certain dominant artistic form....Information space is the great symbolic accomplishment of our era. We will spend the next few decades coming to terms with it." [44] To realize such promise as Johnson expresses, however, in E-journals in history will demand some major efforts on our part, fully as laborious and as demanding as those which have faced us in the production of paper journals.

There is another advantage to E-journals worth touching upon, because it relates to one of the initial characteristics of P-journals themselves. Just as P-journals made the scaffolding of scholarly arguments usefully visible, E-journals permit us to save much more of our constructions. We have all heard of examples of wonderful and ultimately influential works which were initially and repeatedly rejected by publishers. And, of course, we must assume that at least some others, equally worthy, have died by the wayside because their authors were less determined or less fortunate than those who succeeded in winning recognition. As Ginsparg puts it, "One of the foremost problems at present is the large amount of information lost in the conventional peer review process, with the end result only a single one-time all-or-nothing binary decision." [45] E-journals permit us to in effect provide varying levels of validation by making clear the relative degree of editorial support for a posted piece, by adding readers’ comments and authors’ ripostes in the same space.

.O6 Making the Conversion Work

As noted above, I believe that the transition from P-journals to E-journals is inevitable and on balance a very positive development, perhaps even, as Harnad believes, revolutionary. But given the difficulty of making such a major change in such a conservative institution as academia, it is important that the transition be as deliberate and thoughtful as possible. Above all, we must be sure that E-journals make every effort to keep the quality of published or "posted" work as high as do those paper journals to which they wish to be compared. We must do this for several reasons. The primary one is that publication in a P-journal in history amounts to an imprimatur, to approval of content; it signals both those of us within the profession and those without that at least some members of our guild have found the ideas so published worthy of consideration. This bestowal of merit is, unfortunately, often simply assumed to accrue also to any and all pieces published on the web. We must distinguish E-journal content from E-chaff. And we must also keep quality high if E-journals are to be successful in serving effectively the many functions now served by P-journals. To keep quality high will not be easy, for several reasons.

Perhaps the major obstacle is that the reward system of our profession is tied very directly to publications in paper. Each subfield of history has its primary and secondary journals, on down to what have been called by Kling and Covi "Write Only Journals." [46] All active scholars understand this pecking order and very seldom is it disputed or does it change. Most of us would agree that it is less than once a decade that a meritorious new journal appears, and in most of our fields, the numero uno has been so for a very long time.

This hierarchy means that the most highly regarded scholars publish in the most highly regarded journals, and these are paper ones. Those who wish to emulate or succeed them, of course, do likewise. Brent goes a step farther to argue that the quality issue is even more important to E-journals because paper journals carry a built in imprimatur: successful journals can afford excellent graphics designers, good paper stock and expensive printing. [47] You can often tell a quality journal merely by looking at it. While it may be true that on the Internet no one knows you are a dog, neither can they tell if your journal is superior to its competitor without a close reading of both. For this reason, if the established P-journals can break the chains of their success to move into E-versions they will undoubtedly have a tremendous advantage—-brand recognition—over even well-established E-journals in the same field.

Another index of E-journal success, related to the problem of attracting noted authors, is how to achieve what Stephen Harter has defined as "impact." [48] By "impact," Harter means that articles from a given journal (E- or P-) are cited in works by other scholars. Harter undertook, unfortunately several years ago, to measure the "use" of scholarly journals—the number of times which specific articles from a sample were cited in standard citation databases. Harter examined 39 scholarly E-journals which had been in publication for at least three years at the time of his writing (1996), tracked citations from the eight most frequently utilized and concluded:

The fact that this information is more than two years old gives us some hope that substantial progress has been made, but nonetheless Harter points out some important problems. It is far more difficult to secure quality submissions for E-journals than for their paper equivalents. It may be that this problem of attracting the "big men," to borrow a useful anthropological designation, is largely generational. The E-journals, if they are successful, will develop their own superstars, men and women who are impatient with the glacial pace of P-journal publication and who wish that their ideas be widely available at least as fervently as they hope that their dean will somehow realize that peer approval comes in many guises. And as P-journals become increasingly expensive and their archaic search engines (most lack even an index!) frustrate the post-modern researcher, their readership will decline, taking their cachet down with it. At some point the cultural divide between P-journals and E-journals will be crossed and we will reach the tipping point, after which P-journals will be relegated to ever more specialized niches.

.07 Conclusion

In some senses, the move from P-journals to E-journals is not millenarian at all, but rather represents a return to our scholarly roots. As Wilson states:

Moreover, we should all be aware that in large part this transition, though it will be painful, is not so much the cause of new problems so much as it is the result of underlying ones which we have failed to solve. Indeed, electronic forms of scholarly communications may be our only hope of solving those underlying problems of proliferation of costs and product.

We should also realize that if the form of the scholarly journal may be changing in an important way, nonetheless the model of scholarly communication first represented by the journal is itself triumphant, as Arnold has pointed out—it is the underlying model followed in electronic publishing itself—"assemblages of somewhat related materials designed for random access..." [50]

If the E-journal will solve some problems, however, it will raise others. Okerson cites as common concerns of E-journals: "Copyright, citation, user-friendliness, peer interest, university support, university acceptance, archiving, indexing, browsing capabilities and inability to transmit nontext (tables, plates, half-tones, notation, formulae) These are a few of the issues which we must resolve; I am confident that we can do so. (For an attempt to begin addressing some of these issues, please see the discussion in this journal of Project Epee.)

.08 NOTES

Because there is as yet no standard method for citing unpaged electronic documents, I have resorted to a variety of make-shift methods below. Items which are bold refer to a corresponding section of the E-article, usually denoting an internal heading. Please note that whereas the URL indicated in the notes are not "live" anchors, those in the bibliography are.

1. Birkets, Sven. The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in An Electronic Age. Boston: Faber & Faber, 1994., quoted in Greco, Albert N. The Book Publishing Industry. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1997. p. 280

2. Smith, p. 5 This is a position which Smith himself does not hold; I use his language because it is so appropriate to my theme.

3. Valauskas, Edward J. "Waiting for Thomas Kuhn. First Monday and the Evolution of Electronic Journals." First Monday. http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue2_12/valauskas/, p. 10. Valauskas references Derek J. de S. Price, Science since Babylon, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961, pp. 55-56, 94-107 for this perspective.

4. Wilson, Tom. "In the Beginning was the Word..." Social and Economic Factors in Scholarly Electronic Communication. JEP. The Journal of Electronic Publishing. December. 1997. Vol. 3, Issue 1.

5. Willis, Jerry. "Bridging the Gap Between Traditional and Electronic Scholarly Publishing." Paper presented at the 1995 EDUCOM Conference in Portland, Oregon. http://www.coe.uh.edu/%7Ebrobin/Educom95/EducomJW/index.html. Introduction.

6. Gudeon, Jean-Claude. "Why are Electronic Publications Difficult to Classify?: The Orthogonality of Print and Digital Media." [gopher://arl.cni.org/00/scomm/edir/guedon.94]

7. Rowland, Fytton. "Print Journals: Fit for the Future?" Ariadne, Volume 2, Number 7 (January) at http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue7/Fytton/. Cited in Hobohm, p. 4.

8. Smith, Page. Killing the Spirit. Higher Education in American. (New York: Viking Penguin, 1990) 180, 184

9. from Willis’ analysis of Harnad’s work. Traditional Journals in the Ether...

10. Willis, Issues Related...

11. Valauskas, p. 3; citing National Inquiry into Scholarly Communication, Scholarly Communications: The Report of the National Enquiry. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1979, pp. 43-44.

12. See, for example Ciolek, T. Matthew. "The Scholarly used of the Internet: An Online Survey." http://coombs.anu.edu.au/Depts/RSPAS/DIR/PAPERS/InternetSurvey-98.html; Willis INTRODUCTION; Zariski, Archie. "Never Ending, Still Beginning": A Defense of Electronic Law Journals from the Perspective of the E Law Experience. First Monday. http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue2_6/zariski/index.html, 14.

13. Hobohm, The Electronic Edge.

14. Grote-Beverborg, Tobias. "The Register of Asian & Pacific Studies Electronic Journals." Asian Studies WWW Virtual Library. http:/www.uni-koeln.de/phil-fak/indologie/AsianE-Journals.html

15. Electronic Journals List. http://www.edoc.com/ejournal/

16. Arnold, Kenneth. "The Body in the Virtual Library: Rethinking Scholarly Communication " Journal of Electronic Publishing, January, 1995. [doi:10.3998/3336451.0001.104] , referencing Richard Daugherty, Library Administration and Management, Spring 1989) "reward system drives scholars to create publications, both books and journals, that are unrelated to the demand for the information they contain."

17. Lesk, Michael. Practical Digital Libraries. Books, Bytes, and Bucks. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 1997., p. 10.

18. Greco, p. 271

19. The best introduction to this issue is .Odlyzko, Andrew. "The Economics of Electronic Journals" First Monday 2(8) (August 1997), http://www.firstmonday.dk/.See also Zariski, 4; Willis, How Will Costs be Covered; Ginsparg, P. "Winners and Losers in the Global Research Village" http://xxx.lanl.gov/blurb/pg96unesco.html, 8. Cloudy Futures;

20. Lesk, 120.

21. Okerson, Ann. "Back to Academia?" The Case for American universities to Publish Their Own Research. Logos 2/2/ 1991, pp. 106-112. [ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/Psycholoquy/Subversive.Proposal], p. 2.

22. Lesk, 126.

23. Odlyzko.

24. Greco 210-211

25. Arnold "Inventing the Future."

26. William H. Honan, "Footnotes Offering Fewer Insights" The New York Times, 14 August 1996: A16.

27. Peter Applebome, "Publishers Squeeze Making Tenure Elusive" The New York Times, 19 November 1996: 1.

28. "MacMall," (Vol. 89S) a mail-order Mac supply house, lists a "HP Laserjet 5Simx Printer, " described as a "High-Volume workgroup Printer" for $3,099.99. This printer has a capacity of printing 3300 pages per day. Let us figure this as amounting to ten books. The printer is guaranteed for one year, so let us reckon that as its useful life. Assume that paper and laser cartridges will cost us another thirty thousand dollars per year, which seems generous. Working 250 days each year, we can produce twenty-five hundred books at a cost of about four dollars each. Most of us will be content with fewer books, which will run our prices up somewhat, and we have left out royalties, publishers profits, and many other necessary items, of course.

29. Quoted in Greco, p 283

30. Tomlins, Christopher L. :Don’t Mourn Organize! A Rumination on Printed Scholarly Journals at the Edge of the Internet." Perspectives, American Historical Association Newsletter, Vol. 36 No. 2 February 1998. pp. 21-27., p. 21

31. Tomlins, 25

32. Minner, Martin V. "Conference on History Journals and the Electronic Future." Perspectives, American Historical Association Newsletter, Vol. 36 No. 2 February 1998. pp. 35-37., p. 35

33. Having used in a sometimes negative fashion the issue of Perspectives frequently cited above, I should point out that it has many reports of new and useful approaches in it, including those articles cited here.

34. Odlyzko, Andrew. "The Economics of Electronic Journals" First Monday 2(8) (August 1997), http://www.firstmonday.dk/.

35. See also Valauskas for a clearer explanation of the particular conditions which have made this operation so successful.

36. Arnold.

37. Barlow, Jeffrey. "Historical Research and Electronic Evidence," in Dennis Trinkle, (ed.) History in the Electronic Age: Historians and Computers. M.E. Sharpe: 1998.

38. Many of those earlier arguments, and my own counter-arguments now seem quaint and mannered because the tide of change itself has run so rapidly in the year since I first discussed them.

39. Rowland

40. Wilson; Okerson; Brent, Doug. "Stevan Harnad’s ‘Subversive Proposal’" Volume 5 Number 1 of _EJournal_ (June, 1995). See also O’Donnell. http://rachel.albany.edu/~ejournal/v5n1/v5n1.html.

41. http://mcel.pacificu.edu/as/home/as.html.

42. http://mcel.pacificu.edu/as/students/stanley/home.html.

43. Rowland, conclusion.

44. O’Donnell, What Now,

45. Johnson, Steven. Interface Culture. How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate. New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1997., p 215

46. Ginsparg, Problems and Possibilities

47. Kling, Rob and Lisa Covi. "Electronic Journals andLegitimate Media in the Systems of Scholarly Communication. The Information Society, 1995. (11(4): 261-271.) http://www-slis.lib.indiana.edu/TIS/klingej2.html.

48. Brent [1.430]

49. Harter, Stephen P. "The Impact of Electronic Journals on Scholarly Communication: A Citation Analysis." The Public-Access Systems Review 7, no. 5 (1996). http://info.lib.uh.edu/pr/v7/n5/hart7n5.html.

50. Wilson, Conclusion.

51. Arnold, Roots of A New Order.

52. Okerson, The Quick Changes...

.09. Bibliography

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Brent, Doug. "Stevan Harnad’s ‘Subversive Proposal’" Volume 5 Number 1 of _EJournal_ (June, 1995). http://rachel.albany.edu/~ejournal/v5n1/v5n1.html

Ciolek, T. Matthew. "The Scholarly used of the Internet: An Online Survey." http://coombs.anu.edu.au/Depts/RSPAS/DIR/PAPERS/InternetSurvey-98.html

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Ginsparg, P. "Winners and Losers in the Global Research Village" http://www.lanl.gov/blurb/pg96unesco.html

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Gudeon, Jean-Claude. "Why are Electronic Publications Difficult to Classify?: The Orthogonality of Print and Digital Media." gopher://arl.cni.org/00/scomm/edir/guedon.94

Harter, Stephen P. "The Impact of Electronic Journals on Scholarly Communication: A Citation Analysis." The Public-Access Systems Review 7, no. 5 (1996). http://info.lib.uh.edu/pr/v7/n5/hart7n5.html

Johnson, Steven. Interface Culture. How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate. New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1997.

Kling, Rob and Lisa Covi. "Electronic Journals andLegitimate Media in the Systems of Scholarly Communication. T he Information Society, 1995. (11(4): 261-271.) http://www-slis.lib.indiana.edu/TIS/klingej2.html

Lesk, Michael. Practical Digital Libraries. Books, Bytes, and Bucks. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 1997.

McMichael, Andrew. "The Historian, The Internet, and the Web: A Reassessment." Perspectives, American Historical Association Newsletter, Vol. 36 No. 2 February 1998. pp. 29-32.

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Reiff, Janice L. "Riding the Wave of the Present" Perspectives, American Historical Association Newsletter, Vol. 36 No. 2 February 1998. pp. 3-4.

Rowland, Fytton. "Electronic journals: Neither Free Nor Easy" Volume4 Number 2 of _EJournal_ (June, 1994). http://www.hanover.edu/philos/ejournal/archive/ej-4-2.txt

Seed, Patricia. "Teaching with The Web: Two Approaches." Perspectives, American Historical Association Newsletter, Vol. 36 No. 2 February 1998. pp. 9-14.

Smith, Carl. "Can You Do Serious History on the Web?" Perspectives, American Historical Association Newsletter, Vol. 36 No. 2 February 1998. pp. 5-8.

Stoll, Clifford. Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway. New York: Doubleday, 1995.

Tomlins, Christopher L. :Don’t Mourn Organize! A Rumination on Printed Scholarly Journals at the Edge of the Internet." Perspectives, American Historical Association Newsletter, Vol. 36 No. 2 February 1998. pp. 21-27.

Valauskas, Edward J. "Waiting for Thomas Kuhn. First Monday and the Evolution of Electronic Journals." First Monday. http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue2_12/valauskas/

Willis, Jerry. "Bridging the Gap Between Traditional and Electronic Scholarly Publishing." Paper presented at the 1995 EDUCOM Conference in Portland, Oregon. http://www.coe.uh.edu/%7Ebrobin/Educom95/EducomJW/index.html

Wilson, Tom. "In the Beginning was the Word..." Social and Economic Factors in Scholarly Electronic Communication. JEP. The Journal of Electronic Publishing. December. 1997. Vol. 3, Issue 1. [ Author's note: I cannot relocate this source; this may be a bad note. Information welcome!]

Zariski, Archie. "Never Ending, Still Beginning": A Defense of Electronic Law Journals from the Perspective of the E Law Experience. First Monday. http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue2_6/zariski/index.html