Starting and Killing -- or Reviving -- Journals

For more than a century, academic journals have been the primary medium of avant-garde scholarship, and in several ways. Most scholars begin their careers by publishing in journals; and, with few exceptions, new trends and sub-disciplines debut in journals. In many cases, a discipline depends on one or two journals for its definition and survival.

There are eighty-five university presses in North America, and their lists are far and away dominated by books in the humanities and social sciences. Many publish journals, though journals are heavily concentrated at just a few presses: Northwestern University Press, for example, publishes one journal, Pennsylvania three, Ohio State five, North Carolina seven, Wisconsin ten, Penn State eleven, Nebraska twelve, Texas fourteen, Illinois twenty-seven, MIT and the University of California thirty-one each, Duke thirty-three, the University of Chicago forty-eight, and Johns Hopkins University almost seventy; two of the largest and best-known Canadian presses, Toronto and McGill-Queen's, publish respectively thirty-five journals and none at all; and Oxford and Cambridge each publish about 200 different journals. Presses as distinguished as Harvard, Columbia, Cornell, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale publish no journals.

Though many presses have a small number of journals, the oldest (Johns Hopkins) and largest (Chicago) began with journals and are sustained by journals. It is a peculiarity of university publishing that presses subsidize their book divisions with income from journals. If it were not for journals, many books would not be published. Scholars who want their books published ought to consider subscribing to more journals.

Journals are the lifeblood of some presses, and new journals appear all the time. A press will start a new journal that the press believes can become self-sustaining in three to five years. In that time, the journal should become financially self-sustaining through some combination of subscriptions, advertising, and subsidy. Since any new journal must begin with no subscriptions, unless it is sponsored by a society with paying membership, it must rely on subsidy to get by until it is established.

What does an organization or academic department stand to gain from sponsoring a journal? Prestige and influence in a profession, of course, but also a powerful teaching instrument. Many wonderful people in university publishing got their start as graduate students in departments that provided publishing experience by sponsoring journals. And journal production teaches not only skills but knowledge of a field. In literature and literary criticism, for example, consider the writers who were also editors: Willa Cather, H.L. Mencken, Theodore Dreiser, Edgar Allan Poe, Ezra Pound, André Gide, and on and on. Nothing teaches the nuts and bolts of literature like the repair shop of an editor's office. I can hardly emphasize enough the value of a journal as a teaching platform and the importance of maximizing its educational potential within an institution.

Killing or Reviving a Journal

Despite the vitality of journals, libraries are full of dead ones. Why did they die? Usually for one of three reasons: lack of subscriptions, lack of institutional support, or failure in the transfer of editorial control.

Think about what is in a name and what is not. The Yale Journal of Criticism is published by Johns Hopkins University Press, the Northwestern University Law Review by the University of Illinois Press, and the Harvard Theological Review by Cambridge University Press. Journals such as these migrate either because they can get better terms from a new press or because the prior press no longer wishes to handle them. Journals, like faculty, can move about. Journals, like people, can be fired.

A press assessing a journal will consider five major criteria:

1. Cost and Income of the Journal

Some journals cost much more to publish than others. The least expensive journals to produce are those with slender issues containing pure text: no charts, no maps, no tables or photos. Prices of journals are sometimes raised in order to support publication costs, and sometimes to offset losses of income when the number of subscriptions drops. When libraries cancel subscriptions, rates rise for those that continue...