Selected Letters from Readers
| September 21, 2013 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 08, Number 1, September 1997 |
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The following responses were submitted by PMC readers using regular e-mail or the PMC Reader’s Report form. Not all letters received are published, and published letters may have been edited.
Editors’ Note
As promised in the last issue, this instalment of Letters contains a selection from the electronic mail we received in response to our decision to begin publishing by subscription in Project Muse. A complete archive of these exchanges can be found at:
http://www.iath.virginia.edu/lists_archive/pmc-jhup
Because of the length and number of these messages we have grouped them into a separate section.
Letters on other topics begin immediately below.
PMC Reader’s Report on Michael Joyce’s “Twelve Blue” (PMC 7.3)
What a happy, disturbing, confusing, challenging, delightful joy to discover Michael Joyce’s simply breathtaking story(ies) “Twelve Blue.” I’ve been drowning in his words for the last two days, gasping for breath.
The potential and not the realization…the process and not the product. I am reminded of Michael Ondaatje’s astonishing poetry and poetic prose. This is bleeding edge writing, exciting and disconcerting.
Where can I find more?!?
These comments are from: Linda Wallace
wallacel@is.dal.ca
The Editors reply
“Twelve Blue” was co-published by Postmodern Culture and Eastgate Systems. Both “Twelve Blue” and further information about Joyce’s work are available at Eastgate’s Web site.
PMC Reader’s Report on Fredman, “How to Get Out of the Room That is the Book?” (PMC 6.3)
I’m currently working on a PhD thesis on the novels of Paul Auster and always interested in collecting material in the shape of articles and intelligent criticism. Vol 6, no 3 of Postmodern Culturehad an article by Stephen Fredman entitled “How to Get Out of the Room That Is the Book?” I’ve been able to secure an abstract of this (a student of mine gave it to me); do I have any chance of getting the whole article? Thanks.
These comments are from: Carl Springer
fs5y246@public.uni-hamburg.de
The Editors reply
Text-only versions of all conventional articles, including Professor Fredman’s, are available at http://www.iath.virginia.edu/pmc/text-only/. This archive excludes hypertextual articles and media pieces that cannot be presented as plain text.
PMC Reader’s Report: cyberspatial hypereality is a capitalist plot
So I see the only remedy to this centuries-old disease to be the total sharing of information for free by those of us who see the light at the end of the tunnel as that belonging to the oncoming train called cyber-capitalism. This will keep the culture of the net pure for long enough until there are so many of us “doing it for free” that the snakey train of consumerism will derail. So will you please send me enough money for room and board while I dedicate my life to this setting-the-world-righteous cause? I will appreciate email with the details of where and when I can collect my share ASAP, as my rent is again due.
Thank you,
RIC ALLAN
These comments are from: ric allan ricallan@loop.com
Special Section: PMC and Project Muse
Russell Potter, 3-25-97
I wanted to comment on some of the issues in John Unsworth’s informative posting, and thank him for taking the time to lay out all these histories, and set up this list.
The vagaries of academic journal publishing certainly exert their pressures in all kinds of frustrating ways, and the transition into on-line incarnations has not radically altered them. But I always thought of PMC as fundamentally different from other journals, in that its functional ephemerality (back in the days, at least, when it was retrieved by e-mail or ftp) represented at least a partial exception to the old habits of thinking of texts as things, as commodities, texts as substantial material entities.
Now, marketed as “America’s oldest electronic journal” (a rather ghastly moniker, I think), PMC is a little commodity package much like other little commodity packages; it has, as it were, materialized. Access to it, like access to many other electronic scholarly resources, is a commodity restricted to paid users or institutions. The Aedificium, to echo a page from Eco, is once more locked, and with Benedictine conviction we are supposed to admit that, alas, it was written that it should be so.
Ironies abound–among them the fact that I and other PMC contributors cannot access our own writings, to which we ostensibly retain copyright. We have lost the ability to control the dissemination even of our own work, lost the ability in fact to give it away for free, which was part of why I was always glad to have written for PMC. Those who search the web will no longer come up with our fish in their nets, unless they are fortunate enough to be in an institution that subscribes to Project MUSE. In a time when library budgets, and university budgets generally, are in a downward spiral, this simply means that PMC has gone from being available to almost any networked computer user to being available to a few thousand persons affiliated with well-heeled educational institutions.
With regard to the half of PMC’s traffic that John notes come from the .com domain, I wonder how many of these users would really want to pay for individual access. And certainly the many students at public institutions, or at poorer institutions abroad, will not be able to pay up if their institutions themselves cannot.
It’s certainly a sea-change from the ostenisbly “non-commercial” internet of pre-WWW days, and maybe harder to take for old sailors who remember when the information superhighway looked more like Route 66 with potholes than the freeway offramp at LAX.
And, I think, there is a disturbing trend, where the vaunted techno-demotics of the information age (and yes, yes, it was problematic from the start) is rapidly being recolonized, where public electronic materials are being sealed off, pubic-domain e-texts are being scanned, marked, and then locked away behind commercial firewalls, and such things as are still “free” are largely demos and teasers for what is not.
In terms of how these concerns could really have been met with regard to PMC, I’m not sure I have an answer. If institutional support could have come from other, less-readily un-earmarked resources (faculty course-relief, or via a modest graduate editorial assistantship), or perhaps taking advantage of the net’s polylocality by farming out editorial tasks to a rotating team of editors at a number of sites, each one of which would have had only modest demands made on their time, I certainly would have preferred it.
As for what is possible now, though, I wonder: would it not be far better to make the new issue the one that costs money, and make the archive free? This, at least, by adopting a sort of term-of-patent approach to the textual property of the journal, does not close up the conduit, or make what was formerly accessible inaccessible. Since PMC has been web hypertext for a while, the more recent issues would offer sufficient indication of PMC’s persona to entice those who were interested to subscribe. If 50% of the traffic goes to the archive as compared with the new issue, there would be no loss in “traffic” as such.
I also would like to know if I or other PMC authors can, without violating some contract, post our own PMC articles on our own web sites, restoring them to public access. But I’d rather see the whole archive “freed” up, and let the old-fashioned notion that what a subscriber pays for is the sequential access to new issues of a journal or magazine. Most of all, I’m curious to know what other PMC people think about these issues.
Russell A. Potter
rpklc@uriacc.uri.edu
Victor Grauer, 3-25-97
Thank you, Russell Potter, for an excellent post that just about says it all for me. Before getting down to some very nitty gritty practical stuff, I just want to add that the Internet has become something like what the sun was for the Aztecs according to Bataille, an “expenditure without reserve.” And I like it that way. I myself expend a Hell of a lot without reserve, or recompense either, for that matter. And I like it a lot when institutions do the same. PMC has been very special because of its expenditure without reserve and now it will no longer be special as it seeks to enter the restrictive (and competitive) arena of restricted economy.
Now let’s get down to it. How much money, exactly, are we talking about here?…A measly $5000 a year plus change? If I were making $100,000 a year, as is, apparently, many a full professor, instead of the far smaller sum I actually earn (that I will not even mention what it is) I’d be happy to subsidize the whole operation myself. You could call it Victor Grauer’s Postmodern Culture….Anyhow, as little as I make, if you asked me to contribute in order to keep it free, I’d probably plump for more than the price of a subscription, whereas now I refuse to subscribe at all on principle. Haven’t you guys ever seen It’s A Wonderful Life?
As far as advertising is concerned, to be perfectly postmodern about it all, why are you turning up your nose? According to Marshall McLuhan advertising is good news and I’m sure Baudrillard would agree. It has enabled TV to shine like the sun, so why not PMC? You have a lot of readers and they must love to read so they must love to buy books. I doubt if amazon.com or Borders would lose any money if they paid PMC to add some links to its site. And there are probably a lot of those pay-per-view journals that might also like to post an ad and a link.
Victor Grauer
grauer@pps.pgh.pa.us
John Unsworth, 3-26-97
The costs of producing PMC are not large, it’s true, but they total more than that $5K–the Managing Ed. (esp. during the weeks leading up to an issue) puts in more than 10 hrs. a week, and we usually lay on some additional people, etc. etc.. With office expenses of the sort I mentioned before, extra people, and so on the total is between $10,000-15,000. And if you’d like to kick in for that, I could get used to Victor Grauer’s PMC. Capra economics, on the other hand, really don’t seem like a realistic way to go–would you want to be depending on the kindness of strangers if it were your hourly wage that was at issue? Bear in mind, the Managing Editor (Sarah Wells, now) has usually been a grad student or other part-time person, doing a lot of the grunt work of producing the issue and managing the communications flow: the editors, editorial board, authors, etc. contribute their time and effort as expenditure without recompense–this $10-$15,000, then, is a small part of the expenditure that actually goes into producing the journal, most of which already fits your Bataillian model. It just happens that this last part is the nub that has to involve cash (Fed Ex doesn’t do barter; the ME has rent to pay, the phone company etc.), and I’d like to see a sustainable way of producing that cash. Contributions doesn’t strike me, at least, as it.
>As far as advertising is concerned, to be perfectly postmodern about
>it all, why are you turning up your nose?
Advertising might be it, and nobody’s turning up a nose–it may be that our needs are small enough that even the imploding Web advertising market could support them. Michael, do you have any comment on that?
John Unsworth
http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/~jmu2m/
Michael Jensen, 3-26-97
Unfortunately, advertising is hardly a funding panacea for a journal like PMC. Some costs can be somewhat subvened by advertising revenue, but the audience of PMC is sufficiently broad yet small that it makes revenue-generating by advertising hard–especially if it’s not being organized by a professional marketing staff. That is, the time cost involved in soliciting, communicating, processing, designing, and/or emplacing advertising is also substantial, and would be unlikely to pay for itself for an individual journal, were PMC still a “free” journal.
At least $5,000 per issue would need to be generated (even independent of the costs of solicitation, etc.), and scholarly journals–even one with a relatively broad readership–just don’t command huge ad-placement sums, particularly in an uncertain marketing domain like the Internet. Something like 25 ads per journal at $200/ad would be required–more than one per article. Or, if one was really lucky, 20 ads at $250 apiece. Either of those numbers is unlikely. That’s a lot of hustling–phone calls, handling of queries, etc. With forty journals and 4 million potential readers of Muse, we’ve been approached by two–count ’em–potential advertisers. That will change, but it’s not a simple matter.
Scholarly publication–regardless of the medium–is of small market interest, regardless of the high value of the material to the readers. The Project Muse model–in which subscribing campuses are provided with campus-wide free access–is an attempt to do a bunch of things: keep libraries at the nexus point between scholarly publication and scholars/readers, keep costs low by keeping overhead/trouble costs low, provide broad access to high quality material to interested readers, maintain a nonprofit model of scholarly communication in an increasingly capitalist Internet, fight the trend toward cryptolopes and similar unit-based “ownership” models, and more. The Capra/Wonderful Life approach that would seem most apt would be for one scholar at each institution to buy, for $50, an institutional sub to PMC–obviating the need for anyone else (including the library) to purchase it on campus.
I’m the representative of the Press in this discussion, and it’s worth knowing that I discriminate firmly between commercial and nonprofit publishers (their goals are utterly different), and between scientific and humanities/social sciences publishing (their processes and product are quite different). I’ve also gone, over the last seven years, from true believer to reluctant pragmatist as far as the Internet is concerned. It takes time to do any kind of publication well, and people’s time has costs. Somehow those costs need to be recovered. I’m quite comfortable with the hybrid of broad access and a charging model as Muse is currently structured, though if other workable cost recovery mechanisms can be suggested, I’m all ears.
Michael Jensen
Michael.Jensen@jhu.edu
David Golumbia, 3-27-97
We all agree that PMC needs to recover its costs, and that the IATH project was unable to provide adequate funds to do so.
Whether or not MUSE was the only available route through which to provide these funds is, I suspect, more the province of PMC’s editors than of the other participants on this list. For the time being, it appears that PMC will remain on MUSE.
What I’m not sure is clear is the degree to which the goals of the MUSE project–which are to provide alternate access to scholarly journals–dovetail well with the goals of PMC, which is to make dynamic scholarly writing available exclusively on the web.
In principle, most of the journals on MUSE are available to anyone, free of charge–most public libraries can get access to them, either through their own collections or via intralibrary loan. (not that many people take advantage of this, but we’re talking principle).
In principle, very few peole have access to PMC on MUSE. As other writers have pointed out, web crawlers will now be unable to index the contents of PMC (once the current issue is archived). Unless one has access to a library that 1) has a fair number of web-ready computers for public use and that 2) subscribes to MUSE, one can’t get PMC. And here I agree with other writers that individual subscriptions aren’t the solution.
So the question that I think has been left hanging is: has MUSE considered radically altering its paradigm for PMC–perhaps allowing its total contents to be free as a kind of “loss leader,” or allowing the IATH site to remain up for non-academic users while “requiring,” on an “honor principle,” univerisities to access it only via MUSE? Or, as some have suggested, requiring payment for only the current issue, and allowing all the archives to be free (and thus indexable)?
To summarize: the radical restriction that has now been placed on access to PMC cannot, by any argument I can think of, be suggested as a promising event for the continuing health of the journal. I would hope that something could be done to loosen this restriction, while keeping the journal’s goals consonant with those of MUSE.
David Golumbia
dgolumbi@sas.upenn.edu
Michael Jensen, 3-28-97
…Muse makes all tables of contents freely available (including the Library of Congress subject headings, etc.), as well as its search engine; the AltaVistas of the world have no trouble indexing that part of the site. We try to be as open as possible. We’re also working out arrangements with abstracting & indexing services for easy access and A&I of electronic-only journals, which many are wary of, but are more likely to pursue A&Iing when an e-journal is demonstrably stable.
…Currently, 260 institutions and 80 public libraries are Muse subscribers; that represents something like 2.4 million university students, faculty, and staff who have unencumbered access to PMC, and another 3 million by way of the public libraries of Cleveland and Pittsburgh. We hope that more institutions hop on, of course, and they are (we’re in discussions with large–even massive–consortia which will affect these numbers dramatically); individual libraries can subscribe to PMC only, enabling the entire campus for $50.
PMC is reaching entirely new audiences through Muse–community colleges, even high schools, public libraries, etc.–and there are lots of people performing searches on Muse-the-mass which turn up PMC articles, leading to those works being read by people interested in topics far afield from PMC’s domain. This could be exceedingly good for the journal, for the authors, and for the ideas underlying the articles themselves.
…JHUP is granted nonexclusive rights to publish–authors can do with something what they will. PMC’s rights model is very appealing in spite of its “threat” to the traditional “rights” of publishers. It fits with our overall mission as a nonprofit scholarly publisher, and we’re beginning to adopt it for many of our other journals.
Michael Jensen
Michael.Jensen@jhu.edu
Sarah Parsons Wells, 3-28-97
My paycheck has been a subject of some debate here. I can certainly testify to the demands of running a journal, and the unrecompensed hours that the editors, board members, and peer reviewers put in to PMC. I have been reading the postings with great interest.
The Managing Editor’s position is not one that will bring academic laurels, or even employment. As John noted, there is not much professional benefit in the scut work of managing an academic journal. I find great pleasure and great frustration in it, but I wouldn’t consider it a sound investment of time for a scholar.
Some have talked about a rotating staff of editors, who can share the work and drop out after a few issues. I can imagine such a situation, but it’s not a pretty picture, frankly. The work is not rocket science, and it’s not difficult to answer correspondence and track submissions. But, many of the submissions take months to get through the review process and unless all of the editors were equally good at record keeping we would soon have chaos. Authors are sometimes hard to reach, unsure of our requirements, and confused by the technology. We already switch editorial duties between the two editors, and we bring in guest editors who take on special issues. But there is a constant flow of small tasks that need to be handled, routine letters to be answered, and communications lines to be maintained. The editors rarely lay eyes on each other or me, since they are spread out all over the country (Lisa is in Chicago, Paula in Illinois, Stuart in Baltimore, Eyal in Raleigh, and John here in Charlottesville), and they are occupied by other work, such as conferences, teaching, and research. The Managing Editor acts as traffic coordinator, data base, and, hopefully, trouble-shooter.
The Managing Editor is also a reference for authors. Many authors are well-informed and experienced in electronic publishing, and they are entirely capable of formatting their articles. However, some don’t even use their e-mail accounts and have no idea what HTML is. It takes far more time to tag a 20 page essay then one might think, and it can take hours to pull it out of a word processing program, especially if the disk is corrupted, or there’s a problem with an attachement, or if the internet is overloaded. It is simply a question of paying someone to take the time to work out the details and fuss over the little questions. I am paid as much for my willingness to do these tasks as for my ability to do them. And, practically speaking, it is cheaper to pay me to do it then to ask a highly trained scholar to take time away from research and teaching to acknowledge submissions and clean out files.
I am sympathetic of struggling universities and scholars who consider each penny, believe me. And I understand the importance of free access and the impact of cutting off the supply of free knowledge. But I think that the Managing Editor’s salary is necessary, at least in the current structure of the journal.
Sarah Wells
Managing Editor, PMC
Russell Potter, 3-28-97
I very much appreciated hearing from Sarah Wells, who I think has done a superlative job as Managing Editor. I agree that there are numerous small and, in themselves, rather unrewarding tasks associated with editing and assembling a peer-refereed journal. With some of the non-academic e-zines I’ve edited, I was handed the editorship as a kind of hot potato that no one wanted to hold on to.
But although I suppose I am myself a “highly trained scholar,” I don’t think that ought to make me immune to or “above” scut-work. If I, or anyone, wants the prestige or recognition of editing a journal, seems to me they should be willing to sweat some. And if contributors don’t use e-mail or understand HTML, I’m not sure what attracted them to PMC in the first instance, or even how they knew about it. Careful editing may be painful and frustrating, but it’s never a waste of time.
There is, inevitably, a lot of time and energy taken up in editing a journal. But the more collective it could be, the more dispersed that energy, the less of an individual burden it would become. Certainly, you still need a traffic director to make sure that evrything goes where it need to go and happens when it needs to happen–but I think that such a traffic director could be an academic, and that s/he oughtn’t to feel it beneath him/herself to take care of the numerous details such a task would entail.
Another thing that e-journals can do that would break up the logjam somewhat is to discard the idea of “issues” or “numbers.” If, like the journal SURFACES, one simply adds articles to a web or ftp site at whatever point their editorial content has been resolved, one frees up a tremendous amount of time spent worrying over deadlines.
I’m not saying that any of these things–editorial collectivizing, more personal responsibility on the part of e-authors, dynamic rather than static postings to the site, and on-line correction and revision–would eliminate the costs of running a refereed e-journal. But they could keep costs minimal, and by spreading them around a larger number of scholars and institutions, keep the time-budget fying ‘under the radar’ of an increasingly cost-cutting-minded academia.
What disturbs me most is that this PMC thing seems to be part of a larger trend–proprietary scanned texts, proprietary journals, proprietary information–which in effect will colonize the internet. I think there is something vital in the ability to search millions of pages of data, and retrieve the needed or the unexpected–be that a painting by Frederic Church, a philosophical treatise by Kant, a bibliographical reference to a hitherto unknown writer, or a theoretical essay that fits in perfectly with a course one is designing. To the extent that scholarly information is privatized, it will not be a part of such searches, not be a participant in what had been, until recently, a stunningly heteroglot yet idiolectic internet, burning, as it was put by an earlier contributor to this list, like a Bataillean sun.
What we have now is not a sun, but a light-bulb. And if that’s what we have, no doubt we must pay the power company.
At any rate, I’m going to switch over to simply lurking on this list, as I feel that I’ve said what I wanted to say, but am still very curious about what others, especially past PMC contributors, have to say.
Russell A. Potter
rpklc@URIACC.URI.EDU
Matthew Kirschenbaum, 3-28-97
Rather than having only the current issue freely available at the IATH site, what about keeping all three of the year’s issues that go to make up the current volumeonline and freely available at IATH? Or alternately, adopt a rolling year-long period for hosting individual issues of PMC at IATH?
Obviously this would only be prolonging the inevitable, and would not address the concerns that Russell Potter and others have articulated about maintaining long-term access to their own work. But it seems like this would at least take some of the edge off of the new distribution system. I suppose what I’m really thinking of is the way the library here keeps current issues of print journals in its periodicals room until a complete volume has accumulated before shipping the whole set off to the bindery. Those authors who published with PMC from here on out would be doing so with the understanding that their work would remain in the publically accessible IATH reading room for one year, followed by archiving on the Muse server.
I’m sure that such an arrangement would fully satisfy no one who’s spoken here, but it also seems to me that it could be undertaken with minimal adjustments to the current PMC-JHUP relationship.
Matthew Kirschenbaum
mgk3k@faraday.clas.virginia.edu
Eyal Amiran, 3-28-97
This discussion itself reflects (and performs!) the dis-ease of the editors of Postmodern Culture with the decisions we’ve made about the immediate future of the journal. They’re complicated decisions, partly for the reasons already mentioned. We didn’t want to charge for the journal, and wanted as wide a distribution for the journal as possible. That was the reason we chose ascii in the beginning. But free publication isn’t possible now if we’re to continue to publish the journal as we now see it, as a professional and scholarly publication in hypermedia on the Web. Publishing on the web has made it yet more difficult to process and format and publish essays three times a year. Also, as John already noted, doing the work of the ME and of publicity and other development proved very taxing for the editors in the long run, particularly now that the editors work in different places.
That said, it’s worth considering a number of other issues. It is possible that we (or someone else) publish a journal without the kind of editorial process that now defines the journal (including copy-editing, proofreading, and formatting–and even the intellectual exchange involved in the review process). Clearly there is room for such publications, and they would surely cost less time and money to produce so that they might well be published free of charge. But much would be lost if PMC went that route. PMC is not a distribution site. Like any peer-reviewed journal, it is an interactive process and not simply a set of links. To publish as we do we need some financial support (though still much less than the $30,000 normally considered a journal’s yearly budget, apart from release time and institutional support). Hypermedia is a big issue here–it makes little sense for PMC to publish in any other form, today.
Given these decisions, we hope to find new and better ways to publish that would genuinely help our authors and readers. One question here is the role of the press. It’s clear to me that journal publishers will not be able to continue to use their print paradigms in the emerging environments of hypermedia. Publishers are fighting this realization tooth and nail. They categorically oppose the idea of giving anything away for free. And they have no compunction about driving the toughest bargain they think they can, whatever fairness might say. This doesn’t mean that publishers do not do the right thing, or mean well, but even not-for-profit publishers like JHUP (whose journal division makes money and subsidizes its book publishing) are having a hard time figuring out what their role can be in the new environment, and adjusting to their own new expectations from themselves. So far, for example, Hopkins has been slow to state explicitly and clearly in its promotional materials, ads, and on its web site just what is available for free and where, how individuals might access the journal, and what author and redistribution rights are. I am optimistic that academic presses will change rapidly in the next few years.
So what can the press do? That’s an issue we haven’t discussed yet here. Part of our idea in signing with JHUP is that it will develop new tools–for searching, inter alia–that will add value to our articles. We expect the press to develop other, for now unknown ways of improving the electronic environment. The press is also in principle in good position to do the kinds of managerial tasks we have done in the past, like advertising and ad-exchange, better than we amateurs can, and that would benefit our authors and the journal. I hope this proves true. In addition, it should be added that our authors benefit from an association with a reputable press, such as Hopkins, though of course the press is not involved with the journal’s content and processes. But there is a value to academic prestige for most of our authors.
We have signed with the press for five years, which we expect will be good ones. If they prove lean, or if our experiment fails (as Victor and Russell suggest), then we’ll have to think what is in the best interest of the journal and its readers. Considering what costs for whom and how much is part of that. But we also need to take a longer view of our readers’ and authors’ interests. It’s clear that we lose some valuable things by charging for access, and I think it’s important to say that. This is regrettable, whatever its benefits. It’s not as clear to me that, on balance, we’re giving up more than we gain. Life is short and brutish, but consider the alternative.
Eyal Amiran
eaeg@unity.ncsu.edu
John Unsworth, 3-30-97
To put the discussion of advertising in perspective, I thought I’d forward to you all our most recent request for ad placement:
>Hello, my name is Guy W. Rochefort, President >of Dino Jump International. I found your address >through YAHOO. Dino Jump International are >specialists in manufacturing and distribution >of Interactive Inflatables worldwide. My lines >have been featured in Walt Disney productions, >NFL shows, and NBA events. Our product lines >include moonwalkers, bouncehouses, and castles. > >I am interested in mutual links on our >respective webpages beneficial to both our >businesses. Additionally, I am interested in >opening dialog on mutual beneficial business >dealings as far as wholesale/retail efforts for >manufactured products from my factory and/or >resale distribution at competitive pricing.... > >If this email is intrusive I apologize and you >will not hear further from me. Thank you again >and I am looking forward to doing business with >you.
Interactive inflatables: the phrase is so… suggestive.
John Unsworth
jmu2m@jefferson.village.virginia.edu
Lisa Brawley, 4-3-97
Several key issues have been raised here about the ultimate compatibility of MUSE and of PMC as models and modes of scholarly electronic publishing, and this note is in no way meant to foreclose that larger discussion. I would say from the outset that it’s clear to me and I hope to those in this discussion that JHUP has not forced PMC into a generic MUSE model; Michael and others at JHUP clearly appreciate the specificity of PMC as an all-electronic journal with an established readership and an open access policy and they have done much to accommodate that specificity within the parameters of the MUSE project. I’m fully confident that we can continue to refine the journal’s place within project MUSE such that (to adapt David Golumbia’s phrase) our move to JHUP will indeed prove a promising event for the continuing health of the journal.
That said, this much is also clear: any responsible, workable model of electronic publishing will need to provide its authors meaningful access to their own work–our current model doesn’t.
The problem of author access is a central and symptomatic issue, one that those of us on the editing/publishing side of this discussion have not adequately addressed. The problem of author access is not limited to authors who published with PMC before the move to JHUP. Under the current plan, we have nothing to offer contributors other than the free current issue (i.e. nothing more or less than any web user receives). What’s more, contributing authors lose access to their own work once the issue in which it appears is no longer current, as several PMC authors have pointed out here with dismay. I share their view that this is unacceptable.
So: 1). I’d be very interested to hear additional suggestions for ways to provide–not just allow–authors meaningful and ongoing access to work published in PMC. I’d add that citing the non-exclusive copyright clause and reluctantly acknowledging that authors can republish their own work elsewhere on the Internet is not an adequate solution to this problem.
2). I’d like to hear what the other editors and Michael Jensen would have to say to the important and troubling point that Russell Potter and others raise that in granting JHUP the rights to restrict the PMC archive we have violated a primary prior understanding with our contributing authors. It seems to me that in many ways we have, although it’s not at all clear to me what we can do about that under the terms of the current contract (about which more directly). As Russell Potter recently made plain: “I wrote with the understanding that my writing could be disseminated without cost, and I think this bargain with JHUP is a fundamental violation of that understanding.” David Golumbia also notes that he chose to publish in PMC “precisely because of its universal availability to Internet users.”
3). Several people here have argued persuasively that we might solve both the problem of author access and the problem of violating prior understanding by moving to a less restrictive subscription-based model, one that would reverse our current archive/free issue system: we would charge for access to the current issue or volume and provide free access to the archive of past issues. I, for one, find many of their arguments compelling (and I recall that John Unsworth briefly wondered whether “Maybe we did get it backward”). I’d be interested to hear what Michael and the other editors would have to say about reversing the current access model. And I’d think we would want to move our consideration of these access questions beyond simply citing the impressive access figures of project MUSE–those figures, it seems to me, lend equal support to either model.
Finally, I would like to address David Golumbia’s concern that we not merely answer the questions raised here with a “plain assertion that things must be done the way they have been done.” I fully agree. If there has been any plain asserting it may have been out of a sense that we have already signed a contract that grants JHUP the rights to restrict access to the PMC archive. It’s worth pointing out, however, that that same contract also enables and obliges us to re-visit the terms of the contract every year–especially in regard to the question of what is freely available and what is restricted to subscribers. It’s my hope that our discussion here will not only help us identify problems with the current model, but will also help us find innovative ways to solve them….
Lisa Brawley
Co-editor, Postmodern Culture
lbrawley@kent.edu
Michael Corbin, 4-16-97
There is a feel of inexorability, a ring of elegy to the discussion. I mean the contract is signed after all; and while the terms of that contract may be ‘revisited,’ it’s easy to see the physics lesson on the properties of inertia or gravity becoming the mass around which that ostensible revisitation will orbit. I mean also that I’m here because I was booted from the PMC archive for not having my affiliations in order. In fact I had no affiliation. What made my relationship (heretofore an engaging one) to PMC, its texts, its authors, it experiences, its pretensions, its hopes, is, well, over. Someone changed the locks.
Be that as it may, trampled by the running-dog once again, maybe a couple of observations by way of benediction:
I would agree with R. Potter (whose posts herein should be noted for tilting admirably against many of the obvious windmills that are proffered as the realpolitik-speak of the ‘necessary’) that the archive is the field to romp in. That if it could be accessible, maybe by secret passage, or by fugitive re-constitution, all to the good. I mean, in that romp, it’s not the purchase on the ‘new,’ but the purchase on that which matters that produces pleasure.
In that line of thinking, I read the desire of contributors to retain ‘rights’ here as a discussion of ‘retaining’ or rather producing ‘rights’ for readers. Perhaps this is obvious but it is a distinction perhaps clouded by too narrow a look at authorial use-value of the ‘journal’ rather than the more pedestrian hopes of its exchange-value. Something the language of ‘contract’ often clouds.
For me, from my limited vantage, I would, ex post facto, want PMC to be a kind of a fly in the ointment of the MUSE. Struggle against its too ready desire of the very ‘replicability’ that ostensibly is sought. While I appreciate the distinction between JHUP’s ‘non-profit’ protestations and publishing’s evil profit-mongering other, such a distinction too easily absolves a kind of will-to-monopoly of cultural capital that, I feel, a scheme like Project Muse represents. This is not just the apostasy of Net/Web anarcho-utopians, but rather the sequestering of more and more intellectual labor everywhere; not just an affront to a democratic thinking, but an affront to thinking itself. I mean, who do you want reading PMC and why?
Regarding scut-work, it seems to me that it is precisely here that some responsible, more modest intervening might be done. The institutions under whose auspices PMC exist, as has been noted, assign no, or very little, status to said scut work. A longer term project no doubt, but it seems incumbent that cultural capital must be demanded from these institutions for intellectual labors of the sort the web/electronic publishing represent. If such recognition is not forthcoming then indeed it seems inexorable that the JHUP’s and the Project Muse’s will bundle together the de-valued labors of the divided many for the inflated value of the collated few. And do so speaking a magnanimous tongue.
So lets be honest. The bargin stuck with the MUSE makes PMC a different thing. Different from what it formerly was. Perhaps it aspires to a difference from what it elegiacally, perhaps tragically, might become. Not to be melodramatic…so we’ll see. And, well, if anybody wants to let me in the back door when the guards aren’t looking, you got my number on the top.
Michael Corbin
evadog@bitstream.net
Marjorie Perloff, 5-2-97
[In reply to a previous message by Michael Jensen, not included here.]
Your arguments are cogent but the big question that remains in my mind is this: once PMC gets to be more or less like all journals (those not on-line) what makes it special? Different? My own feeling is that once one has to subscribe and the journal comes out in its current format, I’d much rather sit in an armchair (or out in the sun!) and read it between two covers than bother to scroll down the screen. I think electronic journals have a different mission. I like EBR [Electronic Book Review], edited by Joe Tabbi at Illinois very much because of its speed in turn-around and high quality of argumentation. When I reviewed Franco Moretti’s book for EBR, I had the pleasure of seeing my review on line within a month or less and then his response and my response–ditto. That creates dialogue. This is what electronic publication can do. But PMC has increasingly followed the “normal” model–a bunch of essays, a bunch of reviews–and now the need to subscribe, so what is the ADVANTAGE of this over any normal print journal?
Marjorie Perloff
perloff@leland.Stanford.EDU
David Porush, 5-3-97
I was waiting for an argument like Marjorie’s to arise to put in my two cents.
There must be a virtue to an on-line journal beyond the speed, ease and convenience of shuttling the raw data among reviewers, authors and editors. To constrict this new potential into the rut already carved by an older medium (i.e. print) seems an ostrich-like way to proceed.
So shouldn’t we be spending a good deal of our time in this discussion wondering how to unleash the potential for academic discourse provided by this new medium rather than worrying over how to make it legitimate by squeezing it into the old boxes?
For instance: what is the power provided not by a totally closed subscription model but by a gateway or access-provider model? What about a semi-permeable membrane model, which gives the reader-user access, in part, to dialogues with authors and editors through the on-line text? What about a journal that included hyperlinks to other resources, sites, databases, archives, people? What about a journal that was partly “graffitable” (as my grad students have been calling it) so that readers could in limited fashion “write over” or “on” the e-space provided by the journal, leaving traces of their travel through the site? I think it is tragic if PMC, which has already established its credentials in the old, fussy legitimate print fashion (to a certain degree) now turns backward rather than forward. It would be like including banisters in elevators. Indeed, embracing some of the new electronic forms invited by the medium might help PMC define what is distinct about it not only in terms of how its delivered, but in some fundamental epistemological terms.
David Porush
dporush@widomaker.com
Adrian Miles, 5-7-97
As someone who has published via PMC, and is considering doing so in the future, I would like to add my voice to this (and also Russell Potter’s comments). The strength of PMC was that
- it was scholary (peer reviewed, etc)
- it was hypertextual (new forms of academic publication and writing)
- anyone with net access could read it (from my local library to where ever)
While points a and b remain, all of a sudden no one at my campus (RMIT, Melbourne Australia) can read my work, and the only way I seem to be able to allow people to read it where they don’t have subscription rights is to make a copy avaialble.
However, where the work may be explicity hypertextual (for example incorporates multimedia elements and relies on a web server) all of a sudden it is no longer a case of just sending someone some text, but of needing to send or even self publish a web based version, and in numerous cases this might not be possible, and is probably in breach of the terms of publication in PMC (I’m not sure about this last point).
And that leads to the question of mirrored pages/sites. A piece of mine is mirrored on my server since it is bandwidth intensive, so it made sense to keep a copy in Australia for Pacific users. Am I supposed to remove this? or do the links from the original PMC edition still point to the mirrored copy? And what in the future, would this still be an option or only while the current issue is available? (I suppose if it moves to a subscription model then the entire site could also be hosted, say in Australia, Europe, and Japan…)
Adrian Miles
amiles@rmit.edu.au