Rethinking the Academic Journal in the Digital Age

At the 2012 meeting of the delegate assembly of the MLA in Seattle, delegates were invited to participate in an electronic straw vote to help guide discussion of the future of journal publishing in a digital age. “Do we have good reasons to continue hardcopy publication of journals?” asked the straw-vote question bluntly. Its apparent crudity provoked a great deal of head-scratching, as many in the audience felt that the issues it raised were too complex to be reduced to a simple yes/no answer. Yet in its terseness the question raised the specter of a future without print, in which journal content has completely migrated to electronic delivery systems. The upsides of this vision are known to all who have gone on line to look for journal content: the immediate availability of full-text articles and reviews; the possibility of running thematic searches across a multiplicity of venues; the convenience of electronic tools in cross-referencing, building lists of works cited, and the like. But the downsides were also immediately apparent: the difficulty of sifting through the enormous quantity of content generated by the proliferation of electronic venues; the feared weakening of quality standards produced by the multiplication and decentralizing of online publishing; the marginalization of that portion of the public that does not have good access to online resources; and, most importantly for the purposes of this essay, the waning identity of the journal as a venue that articulates a coherent academic and disciplinary agenda through the choices made by its editors and advisory board—first and foremost the targeted grouping of essays, reviews, and other content in a bound issue. To the degree that articles are increasingly perceived as self-standing units, or even as links that can be grouped and accessed in a variety of ways, their connection to the journal in which they appear becomes increasingly tenuous. If this trend continues, the academic journal may end up suffering the fate of the album compilation in the music business.¹

While the delegate-assembly discussion soon made clear that the idea of a post-print age for journals was more of a thought experiment than a near-future scenario, the question of the changing identity of the academic journal in the growing articulation of print and electronic venues is, I believe, of immediate concern, given the centrality of journal publishing in the academic tenuring and reward system in the humanities. In what follows I want to focus on two entwined issues that are of relevance in thinking of the future of journals like the German Studies Review: credentialing, which involves the gatekeeper function of journals as guarantors of best practices and disciplinary protocols, and a journal’s ability to embody and shape the identity of a disciplinary field.

Even if print publishing is not going to disappear any time soon, publishing no longer necessarily entails that one’s work will appear in print. The current shift to online publications has profound implications for our profession, as online publishing is framed by partially different conditions than print. While print is a scarce resource that requires selection and hierarchical scrutiny, online publishing is plentiful and virtually unlimited. Abundance does not necessarily make online publishing less expensive. By the same token, ease of access does not automatically translate into inferior quality. There is no reason why the rigorous vetting and careful editorial work on which influential journals build their reputation should not extend to electronic venues. In addition, to the degree that the cost of high-quality publications involves primarily human labor (in the form of review, copyediting, design, and other editorial work), the shift to online publishing only brings modest savings in comparison with print. Yet print’s scarcity and physical constraints—the ultimate fixity of the codex book, the restricted availability of the infrastructure that makes large-scale printing possible—form a material condition that contributed to shaping the identity and professional function of academic journals, as many of them had to be supported by either a professional organization (in our field, German Quarterly, German Studies Review, Women in German Yearbook) or...