Supporting Digital Scholarship

“PMC was the first born-digital journal published by Project MUSE (and still one of only a handful, I think). It was also the first peer-reviewed e-journal in the humanities. I’m proud that an electronic journal launched in 1990, several years before the Web even existed, is still publishing thirty years later.

“In 1993, we moved Postmodern Culture from Oxford UP to Project MUSE, a move spurred by the pricing for PMC that OUP proposed, and for the following 27 years PMC has been published by MUSE. The revenue-sharing model that we found attractive was an important ingredient in MUSE’s success overall, I think, as was the service provided to journals and their editors by the MUSE staff.

“PMC and MUSE raised some interesting questions in those days, namely, does work published in an electronic journal count for tenure and promotion? For years, I wrote letters to department chairs explaining that peer-review was what mattered in academic evaluations, and not the medium of publication. A lot of bad stuff is published in print, after all.

“In my current job, I oversee the libraries at the University of Virginia (with the exception of Law, Business, and Health Sciences), and I also teach Digital Humanities in the English Department and direct the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities. It’s a good vantage point for seeing that the challenge of the next 25 years is Open Access. I’m pleased that MUSE is so well-positioned to be at the center of our discussion of what that OA future for the humanities will look like.”

— John Unsworth