Much of the concern about humanities publishing has focused on books. Books remain key, since in many fields of the humanities publication of a book (or two) remains a criterion for tenure. The principal challenges here are the capacity of academic presses to publish enough books to satisfy the demand of scholars to create books; and the acceptability of print-on-demand and e-publication for tenure/promotion decisions. These are very big problems.

But Jennifer Howard’s Chronicle article reminds us that article publication in the humanities is also undergoing a transformation. There seem to be two problems here: the reluctance of senior scholars to submit articles for peer review, and the rapid changeover of humanities journals to digital publication. As to the first, it seems intuitively correct that fewer established scholars are publishing in the major disciplinary journals, although I think it would be interesting to do the empirical work to establish the trend precisely. But how much of a problem is this?

The second problem strikes me as being more interesting and consequential. It is certainly the case that the move of humanities journals to online publication has become a floodtide. As one of the original enthusiasts for digital journals, I am delighted. But the editors are correct to note that one of the costs is the potential loss of the journal as a scholarly artifact. I am not sure how many of you were accustomed to snuggling up to a learned journal in bed to read it cover to cover before nodding off to sleep. Certainly I never did. Most journals have been more or less random accumulations of articles that bore no necessary relationship to one another. To the extent that was true, access to individual articles (especially given the ease of access to digital articles), loss of the physical journal is not consequential. I think the same is true of book reviews and the other formats (forums, film reviews, and so forth) that appear in analog journals — we can search them better online. The damage is to the “theme” issue of a journal — one in which all of the articles are intellectually related to one another. I concede this, but I think that careful indexing can still make related articles link readily to one another.

Against this cost is the enormous gain of online article publication. The online journal potentially eliminates the need to wait three months to publish peer-reviewed articles. Why not post them as soon as they are accepted for publication? Much more important, as Ed Linenthal, editor of The Journal of American History notes, digital articles can employ all “the possibilities of Web 2.0.” Real online articles cannot be reproduced in analog form, and they represent a new intellectual frontier for humanities scholarship. I hope the analog journal will survive for the nonce, but what the humanities most need is to explore the full potential of digital publication.