There are thousands of paywalled academic journals with few readers, and no shortage of profitable, thriving websites, like Vox or Buzzfeed, serving up engaging summaries of academic work. Readers in search of reviews that engage with scholarship at greater length can turn to enduring outlets like The New York Review of Books and Harper’s. Few magazines, however, still run reviews as long, or as ambitious, as those that The New Republic featured, and those that remain share its challenges, and perhaps its fate.
But if new technologies are challenging old models for magazines, they are simultaneously creating new opportunities for scholars. Monographs are expensive, lecture audiences limited, and printed journals largely confined to research libraries. Review essays served a crucial role, in part, because they brought scholarship to those who could not otherwise gain access to it. The Internet makes it possible to put scholarship directly into the hands of the public. We can publish work in open-access journals, post free copies of our articles on our own sites, or write for websites with broad audiences. Digital publication has also severed the link between length and cost. Academics are free to experiment with new forms and formats, from blog posts to e-singles to digital monographs that incorporate the data, sources, or media on which they are built. There is, moreover, a demonstrated appetite for such work. JSTOR turns away around 150 million attempts to reach its articles each year. Serious, scholarly writing published without paywalls can now reach audiences larger by several orders of magnitude than can print magazines. Some digital publications succeed in bridging the gap, but with fewer established outlets, academics now shoulder more of the burden—and the delight—of sharing our work ourselves. We need not rely on sympathetic critics. We need only make our work both rigorous and engaging. full: http://chronicle.com/blogs/conversation/2014/12/09/whats-lost-and-maybe-gained-in-the-collapse-of-the-new-republic/ _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
