Editor's Fence

Editor's Fence ELTENJOYED ANAUSPICIOUS 1993 with volume 36. My mail tells me the most recent issues were well received. It's a pleasure to add that approximately sixty new subscribers—individuals as well as some institutions —joined us last year, raising the list to around 870 subscriptions in over 40 countries. Given the changing fortunes of academic publishing, this is a good sign for ELT and study of the 1880-1920 era. Since we have so many new subscribers, I should explain the "Editor's Fence." It has been a familiar feature since the first issue in 1957. Hal Gerber, the founding editor, thought of it as a place where he could be unceremonious in the formal academic setting: not abad idea. The fence is where the editor leans, so to speak, and visits with neighbors. And it's ELTs way of saying a person, not a distant institution, is taking responsibility for the journal and the final decisions made in each issue, some decisions good, some perhaps risky. Something worth visiting about and of interest to many of us are those "changing fortunes" of academic publishing. For one insight into what's going on inside university presses, I recommend a revealing piece in Linguafranca, "Inside Publishing" (March/April 1993, 16-18). You'll find that, as you probably suspected, sales of scholarly monographs are down, in fact as much as 15% in 1992. This affects university press publishing programs and their respective missions. Jennifer Crewe, an editor at Columbia University Press, confirms that libraries aren't buying monographs like they used to, even those "on fairly broad topics by senior scholars who've published three or four books in, say, literary criticism." While most presses once could sell 800-1000 copies and "break even," now, continues Crewe, "it's more like 300 to 500" (16). If this trend persists, as seems likely, the implications will surely challenge conventional means of scholarly publishing; fewer books are going to be printed—good books, not just the mediocre fare. It's all very worrisome for junior faculty, too. They already must try to get tenure as standards for promotion rise. Even in universities that are not usually thought of as research institutions, several good articles in refereed journals like ELT or Victorian Studies may not be adequate for promotion. Isn't it true that administrators press for the more promi- EDITOR'S FENCE nent profile offered by a book? How will promotion committees judge scholarship that isn't printed but resides in the latest twentieth-century format, the ether of network databases? Where this will lead no one can predict. Possibilities are emerging, however. They are characterized in the phrase, "Roll Over, Gutenberg." Rutgers University Press is planning to issue six books in electronic format, on floppy disks for IBM computers. Penn State is hoping to join forces with other UPs to publish manuscripts on a database that can be accessed, for a price, from your PC via the electronic highway, Internet. ELT Press's mission, focused through the 1880-1920 British Authors series, doesnt' need to turn to such alternatives. Our print runs of 500 are selling well and our endgame is to publish a select list of books the UP mission can't undertake. As you may know, some journals are already available through Internet, as are conferences where scholars participate in what might be called electronic roundtables, discussing a variety of topics. As the costs of pubUshing and distributing journals printed in the time-honored fashion go up, and money and library space become more precious, I have no doubt we'll see more journals go "on-line." For ELTs part, we intend to stay close to the cutting edge of the new technology, as we have in the past with timely implementation of offset printing in the late sixties and desktop publishing in the mid eighties. For example, anyone with access to Internet through your university computer center or commercial service like CompuServe can contact me using my E-Mail "address": LANGEN@FAGAN.UNCG.EDU. Some of you, as far away as Japan and Israel, are already doing this. It's a splendid convenience and I welcome...