PUB RUB

ONLINE ACADEMIC PUBLISHING

JEFF BROCKMEYER

BROCKMARTIN PRESS

With

JOEL SNELL

KIRKWOOD COLLEGE

This is not an academic treatise as such. If I can, I want to indicate to all the academic readers and publishers information about on-line publishing.

Some may recall the boom times of the 60’s on college campuses and how many journals were started at that time. Most had the support of an association to help pay for the journal. Over time, in real dollars, academia is slowly being taken over by corporate America and taxpayers are more reluctant to support academic institutions relative to the culture wars. Alas, many small journals as well as some sizable ones cost more to publish and have less members in their organizations that will support print journals.

Thus, the cost of publishing a journal has increased as financial support has decreased. It is also hard to know how much postage has increased in adjusted dollars, but there appears a real cost that transcends inflation. Paper is more expensive and readership for some journals is down.

In the mean time, the number of academic and related articles appears to increase and many who could have published in the past are now left out. Charge page fees, reviewer fees and academics working for free help keep the journal going , but this can no longer continue. The tipping point may be the increase cost of overseas postage.

Thus a confluence of social and economic variables suggests that more journals rather than dying will survive by publishing on the internet. It is my judgment that when key journals go digital, many of the remaining smaller journals will do the same.

As a publisher, producer, writer, web master and related, I have worked with editors and know just a few of their problems. One of the largest is getting back copies that are requested by researchers. This is resolved when every last article is on the internet.

Such requests become a non-starter.

The other is the continuous increase in costs again that does not seem to be a problem at this time for the internet...

Further, there is the subscription charge for the journal. That can now be handled with credit card and the necessary software. Thus all articles that are 2 or 3 years old can be published. The rest remain open and viable to the subscriber. Of course all abstracts are published immediately.

Further, when a subscriber fails to re-enlist they can easily be removed from the internet. Change of address is not an issue either. The journal goes to the subscriber not the school or home.

From my years of business experience, what I believe will happen is that most of the population will continue to become internet literate and when they do all of the above will fall into place.

As this is being written, print newspapers are struggling to survive because of the very issue of reading the newspaper on line or having it come to one’s home. For newspapers, the conduit is paper and print. HOWEVER, other than selected editions, newspapers must either change their function or find a way to deliver by internet and print copy.

Change appears to be the constant and it also applies to communications. Radio was going to put the newspaper business to its own end. It did not. Radio and newspapers would have to struggle with television and yet we still have all of them. Movies did not die with television, but movies did change. This story is constant, but I think that you will see new print formations in the future and the academic journal is one of the many that will have to change.