Introduction
Facing the Future of Electronic Publishing

Enculturation, Vol. 4, No. 1, Spring 2002

It Had to Happen: Electronic Publishing and Academic Reward Structures

Academic.Writing is something of an odd duck among online journals. It emerged from a project that had no intention of producing an academic journal. Instead, the goal of the group of people who ended up founding Academic.Writing was to provide a Web-based resource to support writing and speaking across the curriculum. Unfortunately, we quickly found that the reward structure in most English departments had no room for "work on a Web site." Our solution was to fit our work into a more traditional structure--a journal--complete with editors, an editorial board, refereed content, and so on.

The goals of Academic.Writing are, essentially, those of its parent project, the WAC Clearinghouse. Our focus is on pedagogical practices and initiatives, research, and theory that supports the teaching of writing-, speaking-, and communication-intensive courses. As an online journal, however, we've found ourselves caught up in the debate about publishing scholarly work in online venues. Much has been written about this debate, including an "Observations from the Editor" column that appeared in a previous volume of Academic.Writing. In that column, I argued what has now become a familiar trope in the debate about publishing online--it's the quality of the text and the review process that's important, not the medium in which the text is distributed. In this introduction, David Blakesley extends that argument with a well-reasoned commentary that should be required reading for all tenure and promotion committee members. I'd reinforce David's argument by adding that the shift to online publication is inevitable and that we'll soon be paying extra to receive printed copies of journals--if paper copies are available at all.

— MP

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