Editor's Note

With volume 132 (2002) a new era in the long and distinguished history of TAPA begins. There have been changes at all levels. The most obvious change, of course, is the physical format of the volume now in your hands. The soft cover with an image on the front and a table of contents on the back is a radical, perhaps shocking, departure from the inscrutable maroon bindings that line so many shelves in offices and libraries. The volume is also substantially slimmer than those to which you are accustomed.

The journal's future was already under discussion in the APA Publications Committee when in 2001 an impetus for action was provided by Project Muse^® . In order for TAPA to be compatible with this on-line, searchable journal archive (http://muse.jhu.edu), the journal needed to be professionally type-set. (If you look at TAPA 130 (2000) on Project Muse^® you will see what incompatible files look like.) When the committee looked into the finances, we were pleasantly surprised to learn that the cost of typesetting, producing, and mailing two soft-bound issues of the size you now hold was less (by a small amount) than that for printing and mailing camera-ready copy in a hard-bound volume. The largest savings came on the mailing expenses, oddly enough. The current slender tome, volume 132, numbers 1-2, is a transitional annual volume; the cost- and time-savings realized because of its modest size enabled us to commission and evaluate a professional design for the journal. Starting in the spring of 2003 you will receive two issues of this size (roughly 224 pages) each year, or more pages than were contained in all but one of the annual volumes of the past decade. Among the gains that we anticipate from the new format are: a more timely appearance for accepted papers, a journal that will spend time in the Current Periodicals sections of academic libraries (hard-bound TAPA was never "current," it seems), a more attractive design for the journal's contents, and a cover that invites readers to open the journal, with art on the front, a list of articles on the back, and a familiar maroon spine for comfort. With biennial publication it will also become possible to reduce the (modest) cost of TAPA to the Association by selling advertising space—to vendors such as academic presses—on pages that would otherwise be blank. We will also, of course, have papers that are compatible with Project Muse^®, which will facilitate access to the papers for readers who are not APA members—many academic libraries both inside and outside of North America subscribe to Muse—and produce revenue for the Association, which receives royalties when TAPA is accessed via Muse.

The changes that begin with volume 132 pertain to content as well as design. A small change is the addition of summaries at the beginning of each article. Such summaries, besides being a convenience for readers of the physical volume, will be searchable in the electronic version. Another important innovation in volume 132 is the presence of a set of scholarly papers that originated in an APA panel. It seems to us on the Publications Committee that journals are presently losing potential articles, particularly articles that open up new territory for the field, to edited collections such as conference proceedings. In such venues papers create a context for one another, whereas a stand-alone article has either to create its own context (and risk becoming unwieldy) or do without (and risk rejection). By publishing as a set the papers on the Athenian Amnesty of 403 TAPA shows, it is hoped, a new and attractive format for scholarly work. In length the set is about as long as the longest articles of recent years, so it doesn't monopolize the volume, but it contains, in addition to the two central papers, which offer different approaches to a historical question, an introduction to the question and...