While they may have been lambasted by Stanley Fish for their tendency to prefer Volvos to sportier models, the time is not far off when electronic publishing can provide academics with the Mercedes Benz communicational vehicle for which Anne Okerson recently appealed. Framed by the rising costs of traditional scholarly publishing and the increasing restrictions on library budgets, the turn to electronic publishing seems to be the way of the future. Certainly, such was the conclusion of a recent article in the December 15 edition of The Chronicle of Higher Education . By this I mean that the new technology is understood to offer a way of extending or improving existing practices. Some problems still remain, both financial and technical.
Materials published on the Internet are free to subscribers.
Hence the costs must be borne by producers, which requires advance funding from Universities and other agencies. Or perhaps I am too cynical about the desire of publishing houses to add their mite to the sum of human knowledge. The journal, Surfaces , was conceived to address the problem of electronic publication in French and works by an FTP transfer. This means that files are bundled up or compressed and then decoded or unwrapped by the reader prior to printing. However, once the letter has arrived at its destination, it can be opened to reveal a fully formatted essay on Lacanian psychoanalysis, complete with diacritical marks, footnotes, and puzzling diagrams.