Duke as Spine

Following former associate Warwick Anderson’s account of the beginning of EASTS’ partnership with Duke University Press (DUP) (“STS with East Asian Characteristics?,” in issue 14.1), in this current issue marking the end of DUP’s excellent service we are delighted to invite our former editor-in-chief Chia-Ling Wu to share her experience of working with Duke Press. A founding member of EASTS, the time that Chia-Ling spent with our journal overlapped with DUP’s time as our partner. We hope that with her considerate and personal touch readers can better appreciate this productive collaboration and the achievement it has begotten.

—EASTS editorial office

The word Duke started to appear in a tiny 8-point font on the spine of EASTS in 2011. Preparing this farewell letter, I looked at all the EASTS lined up on my bookshelf and found it quite a splendid sight to see a rank of Duke’s shining out from the bottom of every vertical spine for ten volumes—forty issues in all. Forty Dukes equates to 168 articles, 165 book reviews, and 122 pieces of forum, reports, and essays. Other than there on the spine, though, the name appears only once—on the bottom line of the inside front page, which reads “East Asian Science, Technology and Society is published by Duke University Press, 905 W. Main St., Suite 18B, Durham, NC 27701, on behalf of the Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan.” We have never been to Suite 18B in Durham, and none of Duke Press’s staff have ever visited EASTS’ editorial office in Taipei. Yet the sense of coworking has been so strong for the past ten years. Duke has been our spine.

The editing, production, promotion, and distribution done by Duke University Press has been a tremendous effort on their part, much of which remains invisible to most of us. I’m not qualified to bring fully into the foreground all the backstage work involved in this publishing infrastructure, but I know how strong and steady DUP has been in supporting EASTS. Our assistant editors during the DUP partnership—Shiau-Yun Chen, Yen Ke, and Yi-Tien Hsu—have worked more closely with DUP’s production staff than even with us editors. Yi-Tien jokingly described her work routine with Nathan Moore, Duke Press’s production coordinator, as ordinary and “unspectacular.” But we STSers all know how powerful and significant this kind of mundane routine can be. Our authors and reviewers must have gone through numerous copy-editing responses from DUP, either by email or through the EM system. As to marketing, we might not know much about how it works, but we feel strongly that EASTS has been much loved. We have been so thrilled on the many occasions that EASTS has been selected as the highlight of a DUP tweet or flyer. We don’t know who wrote the annual marketing reports, but their detailed lists of download counts and most-read papers brought us so much joy and curiosity at our annual editorial board meeting.

Figure 1.

A working meeting between EASTS and DUP at the 2017 4S meeting in Boston. From left: ChiaLing Wu, Rob Dilworth, Wen-Hua Kuo, and Sean Hsiang-lin Lei.

Among all the workaday cooperation there have been some interesting “happenings.” When DUP in 2015 chose EASTS to be part of their promotional video DUP as Publishing Partner (www.dukeupress.edu/Journals/Prospective-Journals/Publishing-at-DUP), I prepared a little “testimony” for them: “With the Internet, we don’t feel that Duke is halfway across the world, and it’s very easy to work with the production and marketing parts of Duke through emails. I think Duke makes a lot of efforts to have a real connection, a face-to-face connection, with EASTS. Journals Director, Rob Dilworth, and the Journals Marketing Manager, Jocelyn Dawson, sometimes attend our international editorial board meetings to meet our editors and answer our questions. I think this kind of face-to-face participation helps greatly to intensify our collaboration.” Meeting Rob and Jocelyn at...