Editor's Note: The Prospect Before Us

With this issue Technology and Culture moves to a new publisher, the Johns Hopkins University Press. When the SHOT executive council voted to move last October, it affirmed the unanimous recommendation of the ad hoc search committee after the committee had made site visits during the summer and reviewed proposals from Johns Hopkins, the MIT Press, and the University of Chicago Press. Hopkins stood out in a strong field, so the committee members thought, because of the generosity and collaborative character of its financial offer, the intellectual match between our journal and the press’s history of technology book list, and the press’s reputation with the editorial staff of its other journals for a cooperative style and alert marketing. But I am less concerned about these reasons for the committee’s recommendation or the council’s choice than about another aspect of our new publishing arrangement. With this issue, Technology and Culture will join the forty-five other journals published by Johns Hopkins in its electronic publishing venture, Project Muse (http://muse.jhu.edu). It is a momentous change for SHOT and one worth thinking about. Let me first describe the way Project Muse will interact with T&C’s readership and then raise some questions to which we might all give some thought in the coming months.

First, about the practicalities. After three and one-half years of start-up work, all of the Johns Hopkins journals are now offered in print and in an electronic version over the worldwide web. Although every subscriber to T&C’s print version will have individual access to T&C on-line (look for instructions in a forthcoming newsletter), Muse is chiefly aimed at universities and other large institutions. Libraries may subscribe to Muse as a whole (i.e., all forty-six journals) and everyone on the campus of the subscribing institution will have access to the journals. Libraries may also subscribe to the electronic versions of each journal individually. Eventually, subscribers will be offered subsets of journals clustered according to intellectual focus. The subscription price is 90 percent of the total subscription cost of those same journals in print version. The list price for 1998 is $2,900 for the full database, with discounts for library consortia, two-year academic institutions, and universities with enrollments of fewer than 2,000 students. The press encourages libraries to continue their print subscriptions, and thus far it has seen only a small number of print cancellations from institutions that subscribe to Muse. Muse currently has over five hundred subscribers.

What are we to make of this shift at T&C from print-only publication to print-and-electronic? It is a good question on many fronts. I am surely not the only member of SHOT who has been impressed by the intense and sometimes fervid talk about the significance of electronic publishing. In my reading, thoughtful analyses (and carefully nuanced predictions) appear in a rhetorical context also colored by tracts glowing with evangelical zeal or unvarnished marketing hype. Reading some of this less critical material one could imagine the internet as a preternatural force descended upon the earth, a second coming that promises to sweep outmoded practices into history’s dumpster. Bound and printed books and journals, so expensive in their production, mailing, and storage requirements, so tediously long in their run from first authorial inspiration to finished publication, will follow the dinosaurs. Progress talk, in short, has once again found fertile soil in which to thrive.

My choice of words in the preceding paragraph serves notice that I do not take kindly to predictions of any inevitable outcome for electronically distributed text. Nonetheless, it is surely insufficient for SHOT to critique electronic publishing’s rhetorical excesses. Serious thinkers raise some of the same questions that appear in the enthusiast literature, and it behooves us to think and talk with one another about the implications of internet technology as it encounters the tradition of refereed publication. What follows is meant to stimulate discussion and certainly not as some final word.

For at least four decades in the wake of World War II, the...