PMC is a significant journal of diverse analysis; as an entity comprised of
editorial direction, authorial involvement, and conscious experimentalism,
PMC has come to mean more than "just" the substance of its content. In the
rueful, regretful tone of many of the words in this list, it's clear that
there's a sense among some reader/authors that PMC has "sold out" by
becoming part of a subscription framework; that by asking readers and their
supporting institutions to pay for the labor involved in generating and
publishing PMC, it has transgressed an ideal that energized its first six years.
As Ellen Sauer said to me when we were talking about it recently (despite
our apparent silence, we've been discussing the discussion ourselves, of
course), some of the postings have a sense of mourning about them, which
mirrors the mourning many of us at JHUP feel over the increasing
commercialization of the Internet. She and I have been online longer than
PMC has existed; we participated in early Usenet discussion groups,
marvelled at the vitality of unintermediated interaction in spaceless time,
keened for a fulfillment of the Internet's potential in social, cultural,
and political terms. We've rued the commercialization of the Internet, the
degrading of signal/noise rations in Usenet groups, spoken out at
conferences about the Disneyfication of the Web, voiced early the dangers of
corporate ownership of information, and worked to make scholarly opinion and
analysis at least as valuable and accessible online as the Frito-Lay site.
(For some of my presentations and publications over the last seven years
that address these points, you can go to http://www.press.jhu.edu/~mjensen.)
What JHUP is trying to do is show that the costs of electronic publishing of
high quality material like PMC's can be supported by the scholarly
community. We know--and have seen in this discussion--that it costs labor,
time, creativity, and consequently money to enact a viable and sustainable
electronic publishing program, either journal by journal or in a group like
Project Muse. We are realistic enough to recognize that volunteer time costs
money as well, and that volunteerism has limits; that labor deserves
recompense of some kind; that the presentation of scholarship will require
ever-increasing levels of improvement in order to keep up with the Frito-Lay
site.
Many of the suggestions for alternative modes of sustainability have been
shown to be unsupportable. Yes, if PMC could find a benefactor to pony up
support dollars, then PMC could go on being a significant and fully free
journal; however, that support can be contingent, it can be transitory, it
can be pulled. Advertising can be a help, but trying to sell $5000 of
advertising per issue is no small feat. Author charges are another
possibility, but it's unlikely that authors would be willing to pony up $500
per article for the privilege of appearing in PMC, regardless of the value
of the venue.
The institutional subscription model, in tandem with individual
subscriptions, is a paradigm which meets many of the prime requirements for
achieving the goals of broader readership, broader impact, broader
influence, while still maintaining sustainable support of the journal. Is it
perfect? Of course not: if we lived in perfect world, scholarship would be
valued as a social good and supported as such. But then again, so would
poetry, not to mention homeless shelters and childcare for single mothers.
In a bottom-line environment, we've tried to find a means of supporting that
which society tends to devalue: new ideas, new analysis, and the
presentation of same.
Project Muse is a collection of journals that are predominantly used as a
collection; searches are run most frequently across the whole group,
resulting in the students, faculty, and staff of 400 institutions (with
another 600 currently under discussion) serendipitously discovering articles
in PMC that they would be unlikely to find otherwise. Audiences who never
knew about PMC are discovering its content, and following that to read other
material in the same issue, same volume, same journal.
It's seemingly easy to dismiss this. "Compared to the entire Internet,
that's no audience at all." However, we all know that it's become very
time-consuming to search Alta Vista or Yahoo for anything but the most
concrete phrases. Search on any non-concrete term and you get endless reams
of potentially interesting but mostly useless pages. Search Muse, though,
and a collection of valid, mostly well-though-out articles that might
directly or obliquely address your interest comes up.
In practical terms, PMC's participation in Project Muse will result in
greater publicity, more-consistent coding and presentation, greater
coherence between early issues and late, and the application of
identification and access tools to each (and previous) issues: integration
of subject headings into searches, the "see also" CGI scripts we hope to
implement in midsummer, the dependable site not subject to the vagaries of
new parent institutions. It means customer service and authoritative
versions. It means that as new capabilities emerge in the online
environment, they will be applied to current issues and to back issues as
well, where appropriate. It means support without editorial intrusion. It
means a broader readership because of its membership in a larger collective.
Less practically, it means that PMC has a different (and arguably stronger)
affiliation strength. Being published under the aegis of the largest
nonprofit electronic publishing program in the humanities may be seen by
many authors as a useful bonus when it comes time for tenure review. It
means that PMC can continue to become stronger, more diverse, more rich in
ideas and presentational strategies, maintaining its "outre" image while
still providing (to use an unpleasant word) respectability to those who need it.
Project Muse has already made a difference in the online environment, and is
made stronger by PMC's involvement. Transpose the two and it's also true.
Libraries request "the Muse model" from other publishers venturing into the
online environment; it could be argued that the "domain access" approach,
with virtually unlimited login-free access, freedom to download for campus
or personal use, and the rest, has by its existence prevented other
institutional subscription models from gaining too large of a toehold:
pay-per-drink, limited simultaneous users, library-only access, etc.
Project Muse is not revolutionary enough to mollify the strongest
"information-wants-to-be-free" zealots. Cost recovery mechanisms, regardless
of the mode, will be objected to by some (we've already been called "elitist
fascists" for not making everything in Muse free). But most of those with
the strongest voices (not just those in this discussion list, btw) come from
universities, where they are paid to have opinions, to think, and to
(occasionally) teach. Try telling them that they should volunteer their
expertise, that they should teach without pay for the love of the
discipline, and you'll get a slightly different response.
The practicalities of the issue aren't graceful, and don't ring with
idealistic resonance, but publishing is a practical affair, regardless of
the pragmatic idealism many in the electronic publishing group feel. We
aren't as far along as we'd like to be--especially regarding the addition of
new services and capabilities--but we've been quite humanly limited by
staffing exigencies (that's "shortstaffed," for the euphemistically
impaired). The discussions I've been reading on this list has been
enlightening and tremendously frustrating in equal parts; the context
necessary to fully explain or combat some of the points brought up require
more verbiage than I've spent even on this post. I just don't have the time
to say it all gracefully: I've got too much to do.
I'm unwilling to be forced into a defensive stance. What we're doing will
benefit PMC, and will benefit humanities scholarship. We're not charging
outrageous subscription rates; we're not forcing a one-size-fits-all cost
recovery model; we're not luxuriating in profits sqeezed from the labor of
honest scholars. In fact, we are losing and expect to lose money while
supporting PMC for several years. Do the math: $50/yr for institutional
subscriptions (with significant discounts for two-year colleges, public
libraries, and consortia), $20/yr for individuals. It will be a long time
before PMC is "profitable." Currently 400 institutional subscriptions, at an
average %50+ discount (public libraries, high schools, two-year institutions
get very high discounts that skew the average). In direct PMC costs (labor,
travel, PMC editorial support, overhead, marketing, promotion), we've spent
(at this point) twice to three times that income. And it's only May. This is
not profiteering.
However, JHUP is committed to electronic publishing, recognizes that PMC is
the premier journal of its kind, and believes that over the long run (the
very long run), sustainability can be achieved. PMC has gotten a great (and
perhaps unreproducable in the near future) deal.
Without JHUP, for PMC to be fully "free," the options seem to be:
* advertising (to the tune of $5000 per issue, $350-$500/article, a
tremendous scramble to undertake; further, the banners would be intrusive
and likely objectionable);
* charging authors (to the tune of $350-$500/article--something few
humanists, regardless of the prestige of PMC, are likely to pay);
* finding a wealthy benefactor (and "Bill Gates' PMC" has drawbacks, not
least of which is the likelihood of editorial intrusion);
* continuing to scramble for institutional support on a year-by-year basis;
* depending exclusively on volunteer labor (whose limits have already been
proven);
* or a combination of many of these (resulting in being beholden to
corporate or private funders and/or academic institutions, and resulting in
a large outlay of time and effort in that scramble for money, consequently
requiring that more cash be acquired).
PMC's editors, after *much* discussion, concluded that PMC would be best
served by having JHUP do the scrambling, while the PMC editors and
organizers focused on doing what they do best: performing PMC three times a
year.
The objections to this model seem to be motivated by the sincere wish that
things were different; that the Internet would provide a nearly cost-free
avenue of public discourse; that intellectual presentation of ideas can be
free from the tawdry world of lucre; or that the light which PMC cast should
continue to shine as a beacon of opportunity.
But that presumes a sort of binary state--either free or pay, either
untrammeled or soiled, either open or closed. The spectrum is much broader
than that, however. The "grey literature" of the Internet has demonstrated
that information can be free--but that high-quality presentation and context
isn't. The available spectrum spans singleton online essays, "free"
collections of material, volunteer-supported sites, and professional
publications. I've already written too much, or I'd begin a separate
treatise on where this spectrum trend is leading (to my mind) and why the
cost of enhancements and of professional publication are worth paying; how
the chaotic democratization of the Internet has conversely enhanced the
value of well-organized and -coordinated content; how information might be
free, but presentational quality isn't; how library centrality to scholarly
communication by way of campus subscriptions helps scholarship overall, etc.
Eyal asked what JHUP will do for PMC, and the answer is larger than merely
the consistifying, continuous enhancements of present and back issues,
broadening of its reading audience, contextualizing PMC within an array of
related content, and payment of support costs. JHUP is fighting the good
fight against the commercialization of the Internet--yes, really--by trying
to prove that nonprofit publishing can be sustained online by the support of
the larger scholarly community. PMC's involvement in that fight is worthy of
support. PMC is left free to do what it does best, beholden to no one, and
able to show that quality publications in the humanities can be supported by
the intellectual community.
Michael
=======
Michael Jensen
Electronic Publisher
The Johns Hopkins University Press
2715 N. Charles, Baltimore, MD 21218
410-516-7059 fax 410-516-6968
michael.jensen@jhu.edu