Del director

Del director Those of us in North America, and no doubt elsewhere, who read theJournaloí'ScholarlyPublishingfrom the Council ofEditors ofLearned Journals, or the Chronicle ofHigherEducation, or published and private discussions among members of the Modern Language Association are well aware of the current crisis in the world of scholarly publishing. At stake is not only our daily working lives as humanists and the preservation of months or years of painstaking research, but our very identity as thinkers and teachers. We scrutinize ourselves through our publications and for sometimes high stakes, like retention, promotion and tenure. And those who exercise oversight of our institutions also study our published findings to determine our funding needs and whether or not to allow our very disciplines to survive within our universities. And above them are policy makers and politicians who protect the public trust and treasury, and who at times pander to the public's perception of our work, work chiefly distilled in print. Despite any fiction we sustain of writing in an intimate voice for our students and most respected colleagues, we are always presenting our texts to multiple audiences whose interests and concerns can be sharply at odds widi each other. Those who publish books feel this crisis most keenly. Fredrika J. Teute, writing recendy in theJournal ofScholarlyPublishing ("To Publish and Perish: Who Are the Dinosaurs in Scholarly Publishing?", 32.2 [January, 2001]: 102-112), makes a vigorous case for pulling monographs out of the process of awarding academic positions and pleads for scholarship detached from administrative review calendars - and, in the end, for fewer books, only those that have matured without artificial deadlines and with plenty of editorial oversight. She is also arguing for fewer books period, and fewer academic presses in competition with each other and with trade publishers, for fewer scholarly series that need to be plumped with the latest fads of interpretation, and for fewer physical books that need to be prompdy remaindered or pulped because their moment has passed. I had a painful confrontation with this problem recendy when a scholar whom I admire told me that he had recendy completed a thoughtfully developed book manuscript on Millennial Studies only to be told that the year 2000 -and his marketing moment- had passed. Publisher after publisher assured him that it was a fine piece ofwork indeed, but that by the time it appeared in 2003 there would be no one left still fretting over the Millennium. An overlapping but somewhat distinct set of concerns affects editors and publishers ofresearchjournals. We too are flooded with underdeveloped projects sent in by authors who need to get something into print to save theirjobs, and we find ourselves in the position ofhaving to remind folks thatwe editors are not here to assist anyone in passing their retention or tenure review. Our commitment is to our readers and to the profession, and our implicit promise to them is one of shelf life, that what we publish deserves to stand in an established series, in our own case one of three decades of sustained quality, and that it will still be worth reading for decades to come. That promise of shelf life is actually compromised by the onslaught of electronic publishing because the point of access tends to become the sole agent responsible for archiving and survival. Should that distributor -JSTOR, Lexis-Nexis, Ovid, Project Muse, or the journal's own web site- cease to operate, the entire run of ajournai may disappear all at once. Electronic access is wonderful, but with print copies the responsibility for future availability is distributed among many concerned parties, whether they be libraries or individual scholars. An additional editorial concern comes as a by-product of the thousands of specialized humanities journals already in circulation and the new ones that appear each year: sometimes we face the sad duty of rejecting a vigorous and eloquent submission because it falls outside our established purview. Even if it would benefit and excite our readership , no journal has the right to take a writer's (especially a younger scholar's) work and "hide" it where his peers and principal audience would not think to look for it. La corónica...