PMC was the first peer-reviewed electronic journal in the humanities, and producing it has involved me in continually reinventing the form of the scholarly journal and continually learning new technologies and techniques. My interest in publishing as a topic for research began with work done for my dissertation, when I interviewed editors of contemporary American authors and investigated changes in the economics and sociology of publishing from World War II to the present (see, for example, my chapter in The Columbia History of the American Novel, on the book market after WWII). Given this interest, I regard this work I have done in establishing and shaping PMC as a form of applied research, and I regard my writing and speaking on the topic of electronic publishing as some of the most important scholarly work I have done.
Although we produced a print volume of selected essays from the journal (Essays in Postmodern Culture. Ed. Eyal Amiran and John Unsworth. New York: Oxford UP, 1993), there is no print version of the journal itself (other than the one copy we produce for the MLA Bibliography's indexers). PMC began as a Listserv-based email publication, and it has always been (and continues to be) distributed on Mac and IBM disk and on microfiche. In late 1991, we added gopher and ftp distribution, and in January of 1994 we began publishing a hypermedia version of the journal on the World-Wide Web. There is no charge for any of the internet-accessible forms of the journal (email, gopher, ftp, WWW).
In 1992, PMC signed a five-year contract with Oxford University Press, making it the first electronic journal to be published by Oxford, or indeed by any university press. At present, the Press is responsible for marketing the journal and for fulfillment of disk and microfiche subscriptions: we hope to see Oxford take over the networked distribution of the journal during the next year. At issue in our discussions with the Press are strategies for cost recovery: the plan we have proposed would leave the current issue of the journal freely available on the internet, and would involve campus-wide site-licensing of the archive of back issues. We believe that this strategy would preserve PMC's very wide readership (the journal currently serves up more than 32,000 items per week to its World-Wide Web readers, and has over 4,000 subscribers to its email version), while still allowing the Press and the journal to cover fully the cost of the journal's production and dissemination.
Editing Postmodern Culture:
As the first peer-reviewed electronic journal, Postmodern Culture is a ground-breaking experiment in scholarly publishing. It is not just the first publication of its kind: it is also the longest-surviving electronic journal, the first electronic journal to be published by a university press, the first peer-reviewed journal to appear on the World-Wide Web, the first academic journal to publish networked multimedia, and the first scholarly journal distributed free of charge. More than any other journal in recent history, it has invented its medium, its audience, and its methods, and much of my time during the last five years has gone into those efforts.
Still, Postmodern Culture is a peer-reviewed scholarly journal, and its editorial process is probably not unlike that of other peer-reviewed journals. Since 1990, Eyal Amiran and I (the journal's founding co-editors) have both read every submission--an average of about ten items a week. These submissions consist of fiction, poetry, critical essays, and popular culture columns, submitted in hard copy, on disk, or by electronic mail. Jim English, the review editor, handles a similar process for all the reviews published in PMC. It's worth noting that, from the beginning, our policy was to accept submissions in any format whatsoever, because we didn't want to rule out a potential publication for arbitrary technical reasons. For the first two or three years we would routinely receive submissions on disk, in a wide variety of word-processing programs and even in non-standard disk formats: a good deal of time, in the early days, was spent figuring out what format submissions were in, and then translating those files into a usable form.
Obviously, submission rates and rejection ratios have changed over the years, as PMC has become more well known. At present, a relatively small percentage of essays submitted to PMC (approximately one in ten) goes on to the second stage of the review process. If the co-editors have both agreed that an item should be reviewed, the issue editor (a position which has, until recently, alternated between Eyal and me) will send that item on to two members of the standing editorial board of the journal, and using the journal's email distribution list (PMC-LIST@listserv.ncsu.edu), the issue editor will announce the topic of the item to the journal's more than 4,000 email subscribers, inviting those readers to nominate themselves as peer-reviewers, by sending the editors a brief CV or other indication of expertise in the area of the essay in question. One self-nominated reviewer is selected, and the decision whether or not to publish is based on a majority vote of these three reviewers. Reviewers can vote to accept as is (this almost never happens); accept, pending revisions (this happens with about one third of the items that go to the second stage of review); reject with suggestions for revision (this happens with about another third of items reviewed at stage two); or reject outright, with no encouragement to revise and resubmit. As this account indicates, most items that are published in PMC have undergone revision as a result of the review process--often substantial revision. The revised essays are then re-read by the issue editor and usually by at least one of the original reviewers, and may undergo further revision before being published. On average, then, an essay published in Postmodern Culture has undergone six or seven readings and at least one round of revision before being published. In any case, the issue editor will work closely with authors in the later stages of the process, and as the issue is being assembled.
This editorial process for an electronic journal is not, and need not be, any different from that of a traditional print journal--except for being somewhat faster, since all items that go on to the second stage of the process are put into electronic form, usually by the author, but always with extensive formatting by the journal's editorial staff. The assembling of the issue, though, is quite different from what happens in the case of a print journal, largely because Postmodern Culture has continually had to reinvent its own format, adapting to a rapidly evolving network information infrastructure. PMC has even had to provide the MLA bibliography with the citation format for electronic publications--a format now institutionalized in the current version of the MLA Style Guide. Postmodern Culture's distribution, and thus its format, has had two basic phases:
The text-only phase: From 1990 to the present, PMC has been distributed as plain ASCII text (the character set common to all modern computer platforms) by electronic mail, using first the Listserv program (a mailing-list program running on an IBM mainframe) and later the Listproc program (a similar program running on a Unix workstation). Basic familiarity with these operating systems was a necessity for the journal's editors and staff. Although the text-only format gave us little flexibility in our format, we did make a point of consistency: paragraphs were numbered (because there were no pages)--a practice we continue today; all sentences were followed by two spaces (so that a computer program could, if someone wanted it to, identify the sentence unit). Margins were consistent, and were calculated to fit inside the standard email or word-processing window without forcing unwanted line breaks. I could go on: these details are fundamentally boring, but they're very important to the functionality of an electronic text, and we tried to think them all through as carefully as possible, since we had no precedents on which to rely. We invented or adopted conventions for underlining, boldface, italics, and note numbers, using paired characters from the lower 128 ASCII character set, so that a computer program (for example, a WordPerfect macro) could search and replace those characters with formatting commands. As other electronic journals appeared, many of them adopted our formatting conventions.
From the outset, PMC provided Macintosh and DOS disk versions of the journal, as well as microfiche, originally produced from a special tape version of the journal (but now photographed from a WWW printout). For the first three years, until we had signed our contract with Oxford University Press, the editors covered all aspects of the journal: we took care of fulfillment services for disk and fiche subscribers, did our own camera-ready ad copy for an ad-exchange program with about 35 print journals, ran mass-mailing campaigns to solicit submissions, and so on. As more sophisticated distribution tools became available, we adopted them. PMC was soon available by anonymous ftp and on a gopher--making us, again, one of the first electronic journals to be distributed in these ways.
It's important not to omit mention of another aspect of editorial work in the early days of PMC: ejournal advocacy. On many occasions, for many different kinds of audiences, the editors of PMC were called upon to argue the merits of electronic journals, to explain our practices and procedures, and to defend the legitimacy of scholarship in this medium. As library subscriptions dropped dramatically through the late 80s and early 90s, and as internet use rose, equally dramatically, among humanists, PMC found itself in the forefront of a paradigm shift in scholarly communication. As editors, Eyal and I defended the traditional values of scholarly publishing against economic and intellectual decay, but we also worked hard, during these years, to legitimate the idea of networked publishing, working closely with other ejournals, with librarians, with publishers, and with scholars in many different disciplines. I regard this as some of the most important work of my career, and I believe, along with my work at the Institute, that these early efforts with PMC will prove to have made a significant impact on the practice of scholarship in the late 20th century.
The World-Wide Web phase: Beginning in January of 1994, not long after I had moved to U.Va, PMC became one of the first (actually, the second) electronic journal distributed via the World-Wide Web. In my work at the Institute, I had become familiar with the Web in the fall of 1993, long before it was widely used, and I immediately began to think about distributing the journal through this channel. The Web gave us the ability to incorporate graphics, sound, motion video, and a degree of page-formatting (and print-readiness) that we hadn't had, in the past. Although we carried over some of our ASCII conventions (such as the numbering of paragraphs, to facilitate reference) it was necessary to reinvent the greater part of our format for the Web.
It is difficult to explain, but also difficult to over-emphasize, the work involved in inventing one's medium and form of publication: the problem is not only to learn the new tools, but also to think creatively about how to employ them in the service of the journal's objectives, and how to reimagine scholarship in the process. For example, in the Web phase of PMC, it became possible to use fill-out forms to feed a search query to a Wide-Area Information Systems index of the full text of all journal articles, returning a relevance-rated list of journal articles corresponding to the search term. This is something that we had never done before: now that the search function exists, it is heavily used by our readers, and it consistently directs about half of our web traffic to our back issues. The demonstrable activity in the area of back issues, in turn, provides evidence for a re-evaulation of cost-recovery strategies with our publisher, and the ability to search across the entire history of the journal's publication will help to form different practices of research and reading. Over the last five years I have not only shared in the standard editorial functions of the journal: I have also been the person primarily responsible for the technical re-inventions, and technical support, of PMC as it has evolved from platform to platform.
During the Web phase of our existence, we have seen our audience expand dramatically (from about 4,000 listserv subscribers to a very conservatively estimated 50,000 Web readers). At present, we estimate that the journal's web site receives about 2.5 million hits a year, from more than fifty countries. At least half of the journal's traffic comes from the general public. At the same time, our percentage of unsolicited submissions has increased dramatically, and PMC has become a well-known and widely respected venue for academic publication. Another testament to the success of this phase of our production is that we immediately became one of the sites listed by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications in Mosaic's default "demonstrations" menu (in other words, everyone who got a copy of the Mosaic Web browser got a pointer to PMC). I'm pleased to say that PMC is also listed in all of the most widely used (and highly selective) indexes of WWW resources, and from the McKinley Guide (one of the indexes that rates the sites it lists) PMC receives the highest rating (four stars) in all categories--Coverage, Organization, Currency, and Ease of Access.
The Web also makes possible some significant advances in our collaborative editorial process--advances that I'm still developing. With $35,000 from AT&T, I plan to finish development of some Web-mediated workgroup software that will allow an editor to assign appropriate permissions to authors, reviewers, and others, such that an author may edit her own manuscript and read, but not edit, the comments of peer reviewers; peer reviewers may read, but not edit, the work of an author and may write their own reviews of that work, but not read the reviews of others; and editors may read and edit the work of all parties. This software is already about 85% complete, and the AT&T money will be used to put a user-friendly management interface on it, so that non-programmers can create and configure workgroups. I see this software as something that will be extremely useful, not only to PMC, but to any group attempting to do collaborative work (especially peer-review) over the network, and in many teaching situations.
In retrospect, I can't imagine a more rewarding, more educative, more valuable project than PMC has been, and continues to be. Editing the journal has given me insight into the profession's inmost processes, exposed the full range of quality in its members' production, and provided me with an opportunity to re-imagine and re-invent the way the profession transacts its scholarly business. Most importantly, though, the experience of editing the journal, in all its facets, prepared me for the job of directing the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities.
Index of Tenure Materials