Passing the Baton II

It was my intent when I moved from executive editor to the role of editor of portal: Libraries and the Academy to serve for only five years. As with many things, “time flies…” The editorial work alone would have been sufficiently rewarding. The real highlight, however, has been my work with a most talented and committed editorial board. Ours is a working board, which is key to assuring the quality of the articles that appear in our pages. The double blind review process is the board’s singular responsibility and is at the heart of portal evaluation. They have made this a truly collaborative undertaking throughout the last eight years in which portal has matured to become a highly respected journal that expresses the values and leading edge issues of our field. I believe that portal has more than lived up to its ideals. Its origins lie in the concerns that arose among board members and editors of JAL when Elsevier purchased the title. After some efforts to assure that there would be some price discipline, most of us determined that we could not in conscience continue and decided to undertake the founding of a new title.¹

We have followed the values that we enunciated at the beginning—pricing reflects real cost and real inflation; authors have freedom to post their work outside of Muse, no questions asked; we have cultivated a broad meaning for scholarship that recognizes the nature of our “practiced discipline” and also that scholarship is the expression of well-grounded research; we have encouraged first-time authors; and our readership has found access primarily through the medium of the Internet, albeit there is a modest print run.²

In the last issue, I wrote at length about the challenges we face in the broader environment. ³ In particular, large scale consolidation of scholarly publishing is a trend that clearly threatens a core value of the academy in producing new knowledge—that of the widest sharing of that knowledge “to promote the progress of science and useful arts,” to crib from the U.S. constitution. This is not a value that today is always shared by those to whom we turn over the responsibility of disseminating that knowledge. When publishers are responsible to shareholders for creating a good “price to earnings” ratio, this is perfectly understandable. As the values diverge, however, the challenge will become greater for the sector of scholarly publishing that struggles with thin margins to produce high-quality, low-cost avenues for dissemination of knowledge. It is among the latter that portal finds its home and that is a fact of which our board is proud.

In the January 2009 issue, Sarah Pritchard, Charles Deering McCormick University Librarian, Northwestern University, will take over the responsibility of editorship, and I will become editor emeritus. I can gladly say that I will continue to serve on the board. I should close by giving thanks to our press partners Kathleen Keane, director of The Johns Hopkins University Press and particularly to Bill Breichner, head of journals publishing, and Mary Muhler, journals production coordinator. The press provides an environment in which journals like portal can flourish. Finally, I want to thank Managing Editor/Copy Editor Marcia Duncan Lowry for her hard work and dedication to our endeavor. She makes all of us look good. The journal is fortunate that she will stay on under Sarah’s editorship.