Laurent Brun wrote:

I have no solution to propose but we should seek to find new ways to publish scholarly works and make them generally available to the public. There's are electronic forms of publications but there also are some publishers who sell their books at decent prices. Why not trade a bit of "prestige" for easier and wider access?

LB

I'm not sure the question is simply one of prestige, although it is that too. The main problem, as I see it, with on-line publications is not that they are free, but that they are too easy to publish. The advantage of the presses is the gatekeeper effect: the work has been vetted to a certain degree, and, perhaps even more importantly, somebody has hopefully demanded that typos are fixed, that there is bibliographic consistency, up-to-date referencing, etc. (I realise that a) this is not always true and there are some real stinkers from prestigious presses, b) that this can smother innovation, and c) that there are very high quality on-line publications; it is, however, mostly true, I think).

My own belief is that the key to successful, prestigious but useful and free/low cost publication is improved refereeing on-line. We need gatekeeper sites that allow authors access to prestige in exchange for their agreement to maintain the kind of standards found, if not always consistently, in the scholarly print world. Certainly as we have been putting together the plans for the Digital Medievalist (on-line) journal, this has been foremost in our minds. We have been trying to capture the best of both worlds by constructing an entity that has room for the greater currency found on-line (we will be welcoming project reports and commentary/polemical pieces) and the (in reputation at least) farther reach and great care found in refereed print publications.

The problem with gatekeepers is that they need to be maintained (and hence cost money), and can become overly clique-y and conservative. I'm not unique in suggesting that ultimately the way forward is to turn to the scholarly societies and communities for maintenance, since academics tend to be willing to donate time to such projects, and universities are often willing to host permanent server sites (something the University of Lethbridge is doing for us). The cliqueishness and conservativeness of the gatekeeper is something that can only be address by members of the community when they are asked to referee. I am sometimes appalled at how destructive and poor quality humanities refereeing is (though I also know of good examples). Having grown up in a scientist's family, I know that, while far from perfect, it can be much more constructive in other disciplines--although it is also true that Physics Letters (I think it is) ultimately had to issue ground rules to referees noting that they would not accept mean-spirited and non-constructive readers reports. I was talking about this last problem with a number of Canadian social scientists and humanists at a recent SSHRC (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council [of Canada]) meeting. We're debating whether we shouldn't start looking for or working on a general advice sheet for constructive refereeing.

I suppose the last paragraph is off topic for this list, though it is something we've been discussing for the journal. -dan