The journal had until then pursued a policy of accepting all reasonable contributions and giving reasonable reasons for the rejection of those deemed after all unreasonable by the editors in charge. Instead, starting with 1985 only an average of six issues of 112 pages each per year were produced and individual discussion with would-be authors was abandoned. Varia Aegyptiaca , long defunct, and Discussions in Egyptology which lived much longer by the willpower of our colleague Alessandra Nibbi. If you want to keep this public, you do not have much leeway to raise prices. Too much exclusiveness on the contents side flies into the face of the established policy of the journal to provide a forum to the rest of us.
Monographs give way to thematic and interdisciplinary collections of papers.
New journals have continuously been founded in the last thirty years. Subdisciplines, such as, e.g. Demotic Studies, have grown so much that they all but separated from the ancient mainstream. The cultural wars of the 80s and 90s have not left too many traces yet on the narrower field of Egyptological journals, meaning that journals have not yet sprung up on the academic inside purporting to engender, africanize or queer Ancient Egypt, but this may depend more on the diminutive size of the field than on a higher degree of conservatism as compared to the modern philologies and literatures. Observing this trend, the question is whether a purely Egyptological journal which publishes sundry and mostly mainstream miscellanies with little editorial input and little coherence can continue to find a niche in the market. The impact had various facettes.