We decided to focus our efforts on the field of media studies for a number of reasons, some intellectual and some structural. On the intellectual side, scholars in media studies explore the very tools that a network such as the one we're proposing will use, thus allowing for a productive self-reflexivity, leaving the network itself open to continual analysis and critique. Moreover, publishing within such a network seems increasingly crucial to media scholars, who need the ability to quote from the multi-mediated materials they write about, and for whom form needs to be able to follow content, allowing not just for writing about mediation but writing in a mediated environment. This connects to one of the key structural reasons for our choice: we're convinced that media studies scholars will need to lead the way in convincing tenure and promotion committees that new modes of publishing like this network are not simply valid but important. As media scholars can make the "form must follow content" argument convincingly, and as tenure qualifications in media studies often include work done in media other than print already, we hope that media studies will provide a key point of entry for a broader reshaping of publishing in the humanities.

Our shift from thinking about an "electronic press" to thinking about a "scholarly network" came about gradually; the more we thought about the purposes behind electronic scholarly publishing, the more we became focused on the need not simply to provide better access to discrete scholarly texts but rather to reinvigorate intellectual discourse, and thus connections, amongst peers — and, not incidentally, discourse between the academy and the wider intellectual public. The financial crisis in scholarly publishing is, after all, not unrelated to the failure of most academic writing to find any audience outside the academy. While we wouldn't want to suggest that all scholarly production ought to be accessible to non-specialists — there's certainly a need for the kinds of communication amongst peers that wouldn't be of interest to most mainstream readers — we do nonetheless believe that the lack of communication between the academy and the wider reading public points to a need to rethink the role of the academic in public intellectual life.

With that as preamble, let me attempt to describe what we're currently imagining for MediaCommons. In October 2006, we began the gradual rollout of the network, starting with a planning site on which we spent a couple of months thinking out loud about the features that MediaCommons will present, and through which we got a chance to test drive a couple of those features. MediaCommons, as of right now, has three basic modules: the blog, where the thinking out loud is taking place; the call for "papers," which invites media studies scholars to submit proposals for projects to be developed as the first round of publications within the network; and " In Media Res," the first of the features that we hope will be a continuing feature on the network once fully launched. In this feature, each week a media scholar posts a short video clip of some very recent media text that they've been thinking about, along with a very brief commentary, designed less to fully explicate the clip than to provoke discussion. This feature highlights for me two of the primary reasons for developing a network like MediaCommons: to foster multivocal conversation amongst scholars, and to allow ways that scholarly conversations about new media texts can take place at something approaching the speed that the media itself moves. (A recurrent half-joke in television studies, for instance, is that this year has seen an enormous efflorescence of scholarship on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and just in time, too: the series ended two and a half years ago.)

As I say, though, MediaCommons is very much in the planning stages, and though new features will gradually come online over the next few months, the development process is being taken purposefully slowly, as we attempt to build our network of scholars at the same time we build our digital network, trying to get as much investment and direction from our membership as possible. Given that, much of what follows is speculative; no doubt we'll get into the development process and discover that some of our desires can't immediately be met due to technological or financial limitations. We'll also no doubt be inspired to add new resources that we can't currently imagine. This indeterminacy is not a drawback, however, but instead one of the most tangible benefits of working within a digitally networked environment, which allows for a malleability and growth that makes such evolution not just possible but desirable.

The various nodes that we're imagining as part of MediaCommons will support the publication and discussion of a wide variety of forms of scholarly writing. Those nodes will likely include:

— electronic "monographs," which will allow editors and authors to work together in the development of ideas that surface in blogs and other discussions, as well as in the design, production, publicizing, and review of individual and collaborative projects (Mackenzie Wark's GAM3R 7H30RY, pre-published online by the Institute for the Future of the Book, and now coming out in print from Harvard, is a key model here);

— electronic "casebooks," which will bring together writing by many authors on a single subject—a single television program or theoretical approach, for instance—along with pedagogical and other materials, allowing the casebooks to serve as continually evolving textbooks;

— electronic reference works, in which a community collectively produces, in a mode analogous to current wiki projects, authoritative resources for research in the field;

— electronic forums, including a wealth of blogs, through which a wide range of media scholars will be able to discuss media events in something like real time. These nodes will promote ongoing discourse and interconnection among readers and writers, and will allow for the germination and exploration of the ideas and arguments that will lay the groundwork for more sustained pieces of scholarly writing.

Many other such possibilities are imaginable. The key elements that they share, made possible by digital technologies, are their interconnections and their openness for discussion and revision. These potentials will help scholars energize their lives as writers, as teachers, and as public intellectuals. Such openness and interconnection will also allow us to make the process of scholarly work just as visible and valuable as its product; readers will be able to follow the development of an idea from its germination in a blog, though its drafting as an article, to its revisions, and authors will be able to work in dialogue with those readers, generating discussion and obtaining feedback on work-in-progress at many different stages. Because such discussions will take place in the open, and because the enormous time lags of the current modes of academic publishing will be greatly lessened, this ongoing discourse among authors and readers will no doubt result in the generation of many new ideas, leading to more exciting new work.

Moreover, as each user will have their own profile page within the site (the image is a screenshot of my profile page from the prototype MediaCommons site), they'll be able to maintain their own personal repository of all of the writing they've done on the site, allowing the kinds of work, like peer reviews, that currently have no public life or utility whatsoever, to become part of the overall scholarly production for which we receive some kind of "credit."

We're of course still in the process of designing how MediaCommons will function on a day-to-day basis. MediaCommons will be membership-driven; membership will be open to anyone interested, including writers and readers both within and outside the academy, and that membership have a great deal of influence over the directions in which the network develops. The network's operations will be led by an editorial board composed of me and my co-coordinating editor, Avi Santo, overseeing the network as a whole, and a number of area editors, whom we've just finished recruiting, who will have oversight over different nodes on the network (such as long-form projects, community-building, design, etc), helping to shepherd discussion and develop projects. The editorial board will have the responsibility for setting and implementing network policy, but will do so in dialogue with the general membership.

MediaCommons will also, crucially, serve as an intervention into the processes of scholarly peer review. Our plan is to develop and employ a process of "peer-to-peer review," in which texts are discussed and, in some sense, "ranked" by a committed community of readers. How exactly this peer-to-peer review process will work is open to some discussion, as yet. The editorial board will, at our first meeting later this month, develop a set of guidelines for determining which readers will be designated "peers," and within which nodes of MediaCommons; these "peers" will then have the charge to review the texts posted in their nodes. The authors of those texts undergoing review will be encouraged to respond to the comments and criticisms of their peers, transforming a one-way process of critique into a multi-dimensional conversation.

Because this process will take place in public, we feel that certain rules of engagement will be important, including that authors must take the first step in requesting review of their work, such that the fear of a potentially damaging critique being levied at a text-in-process can be ameliorated; that peers must comment publicly, and must take responsibility for their critiques by attaching their names to them, creating an atmosphere of honest, thoughtful debate; that authors should have the ability to request review from particular member constituencies whose readings may be of most help to them; that authors must have the ability to withdraw texts that have received negative reviews from the network, in order that they might revise and resubmit; and that authors and peers alike must commit themselves to regular participation in the processes of peer-to-peer review. Peers need not necessarily be authors, but authors should always be peers, invested in the discussion of the work of others on the network.

So this is where things are with the project today. We've established our editorial board, which will be coming together to begin the process of creating network policy next month. We've begun the development from our early planning site to the foundations of MediaCommons proper. We've gotten a number of very exciting proposals for projects (including one that seeks to enable scholars of cinema studies to produce their scholarship as video essays, one that will collect, annotate, and discuss texts of media theory written by politically engaged media practitioners, and one that will bring together student media projects as the foundation of a sort of pedagogical reverse-engineering for media studies). Our hope is to begin rolling out new network nodes during the spring, moving toward a full launch of the first MediaCommons projects this fall.

MediaCommons won't solve all our problems. There are some major questions yet to be answered, for instance, about the network's ongoing mode of financial support. But it's clear to all of us working on the project that the humanities have a long way to go in catching up to the sciences in dealing with the current crisis in scholarly publishing, and we're hopeful that MediaCommons might provide one useful model for reimagining the ways that scholarship gets done in the age of the internet.

Are these the functions that we really want peer review to serve? Vast amounts of scholars' time is poured into the peer review process each year; wouldn't it be better to put that time into open discussions that not only improve the individual texts under review but are also, potentially, productive of new work? Isn't it possible that scholars would all be better served by separating the question of credentialing from the publishing process, by allowing everything through the gate, by designing a post-publication peer review process that focuses on how a scholarly text should be received rather than whether it should be out there in the first place? What if peer review learned from social software systems such as Digg, and became "peer-to-peer review"? Would the various credentialing bodies that currently rely on peer review's gatekeeping function be satisfied if we were to say to them, "no, anonymous reviewers did not determine whether my article was worthy of publication, but if you look at the comments that my article has received, you can see that five of the top experts in my field had really positive, constructive things to say about it"?

Such a peer-to-peer system raises some potential pitfalls, of course — ask any blogger about phenomena like comment spam — but a system of post-publication comment-driven open peer review, in conjunction with technologies like versioning and trackbacks, would allow for the ongoing discussion and revision necessary to all scholarly thought.

There are a couple of implications of this shift that bear some immediate consideration, not least that these new technologies introduce what is to some scholars an unnerving sense of collaborative authorship in intellectual work. Such collaboration, however, is only unnerving to those of us in the humanities; work in both the sciences and the social sciences is heavily (and in some fields, entirely) reliant upon the multi-author text. What a new, networked system of publishing and review implies, however, is less a move away from individual authorship than a recognition that no author is an island, so to speak, that we're all always working in dialogue with others. Even in a radically collective and collaborative electronic publishing system, the individual author would still exist (and would still maintain some form of "ownership" over her ideas, via some means of Creative Commons licensing), but would do her work in material relation to the work of others, in a process of discussion and revision that now takes place behind the scenes, but that I'd argue is important enough to be moved out in front of the curtain.

More importantly, however, such changes in the processes of academic publishing would return scholarly communication to the gift-economy mode within which, I would argue, it was always intended to operate, a mode in which all gains in knowledge produced by individual research are made not for the advancement of that individual, but for the collective benefit of the field as a whole.

A second area for concern in bringing about such a radical change in peer-review, however, is the need to promote a new understanding of peer-review within our institutions, such that texts published within such a system would be taken seriously by college and university review and promotion committees. Such a new understanding is already desperately needed; one of the problems in academic publishing right now — what makes the economic hardships of the current university publishing system not merely a change but a crisis — is that, as Stephen Greenblatt pointed out some years back in his letter to the membership of the MLA, too many academic institutions rely on presses to make their tenure decisions for them. The granting of tenure should not be reliant on whether the vagaries of any publishing system did or did not allow a text to come into circulation, but rather on the value of that text, and on the importance it bears for its field. Peer-review thus demands to be transformed from a system of gatekeeping to a mode of manifesting the responses to and discussion of a multiplicity of ideas in circulation.

In order for this change to take root, however, with as little potential for damage to the careers of junior faculty as possible, tenured scholars are going to have to take the first plunge. Until institutional biases about the relative value of electronic and print publication are changed — but moreover, until we come to understand peer-review as part of an ongoing conversation among scholars rather than a convenient means of determining "value" without all that inconvenient reading and discussion — the processes of evaluation for tenure and promotion are doomed to become a monster that eats its young, trapped in an early twentieth century model of scholarly production that simply no longer works.

The issue of peer review has been taken up by a number of recent publishing experiments, including arXiv's 2004 implementation of an "endorsement" system that requires scholars to vouch for one another before they are allowed to upload papers. (It appears, however, that this endorsement system is only in effect for scholars without academic affiliations, or with email addresses that do not reveal such affiliations.) The peer review experiment that has gotten the most press of late, however, is that which was undertaken last year by the journal Nature, which was accompanied by a debate about the future of peer review. The experiment was fairly simple: the editors of Nature created an online open review system that ran parallel to its traditional anonymous review process. "From 5 June 2006," the editors wrote, "authors may opt to have their submitted manuscripts posted publicly for comment. Any scientist may then post comments, provided they identify themselves. Once the usual confidential peer review process is complete, the public ‘open peer review' process will be closed. Editors will then read all comments on the manuscript and invite authors to respond. At the end of the process, as part of the trial, editors will assess the value of the public comments."

That experiment was closed in early December, after which time the editors did analyze the data resulting from it, and, later in the month, declared the experiment to have failed, announcing that "for now at least, we will not implement open peer review."

The statistics that they cited are indeed indicative of some serious issues in the open system they implemented: only 5% of authors who submitted work during the trial agreed to have their papers opened to public comment; of those papers, only 54% (or 38 out of a total of 71) received substantive comments. But certain aspects of the experiment beg the question of whether the test wasn't rigged from the beginning, destined for a predictable failure because of the trial's constraints.

First, no real impetus was created for authors to open their papers to public review; in fact, the open portion of the peer review process was wholly optional, and had no bearing whatsoever on the editors' decision to publish any given paper. And second, no incentive was created for commenters to participate in the process; why go to all the effort of reading and commenting on a paper if your comments serve no identifiable purpose?
As several entries in the web debate held alongside Nature's peer review trial made clear, though, the editors had not chosen a groundbreaking model; the editors of several other scientific journals that already use open review systems to varying extents posted brief comments about their processes. Electronic Transactions in Artificial Intelligence, for instance, has a two-stage process, a three-month open review stage, followed by a speedy up-or-down refereeing stage (with some time for revisions, if desired, inbetween). This process, the editors acknowledge, has produced some complications in the notion of "publication," as the texts in the open review stage are already freely available online; in some sense, the journal itself has become a vehicle for re-publishing selected articles.

Peer review is, by this model, designed to serve two different purposes—first, fostering discussion and feedback amongst scholars, with the aim of strengthening the work that they produce; second, filtering that work for quality, such that only the best is selected for final "publication." ETAI's dual-stage process makes this bifurcation in the purpose of peer review clear, and manages to serve both functions well. Moreover, by foregrounding the open stage of peer review — by considering an article "published" during the three months of its open review, but then only "refereed" once anonymous scientists have held their up-or-down vote, a vote that comes only after the article has been read, discussed, and revised — this kind of process seems to return the center of gravity in peer review to communication amongst peers.

This process highlights the relatively conservative move that Nature made with its open peer review trial. First, the journal was at great pains to reassure authors and readers that traditional, anonymous peer review would still take place alongside open discussion. Beyond this, however, there was a relative lack of communication between those two forms of review: open review took place at the same time as anonymous review, rather than as a preliminary phase, preventing authors from putting the public comments they received to use in revision; and while the editors "read" all such public comments, it appears that only the anonymous reviews were considered in determining whether any given article was published.

Was this caution about open review an attempt to avoid throwing out the baby of quality control with the bathwater of anonymity? In fact, the editors of Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics presented evidence (based on their two-stage review process) that open review significantly increases the quality of articles a journal publishes:

"Our statistics confirm," they wrote, "that collaborative peer review facilitates and enhances quality assurance. The journal has a relatively low overall rejection rate of less than 20%, but only three years after its launch the ISI journal impact factor ranked Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics twelfth out of 169 journals in ‘Meteorology and Atmospheric Sciences' and ‘Environmental Sciences'."

They continue: "These numbers support the idea that public peer review and interactive discussion deter authors from submitting low-quality manuscripts, and thus relieve editors and reviewers from spending too much time on deficient submissions."

So closed, anonymous peer review processes and quality control aren't all that related. In fact, it's arguable that the primary result of a closed peer review process is a negative one — scholars are hindered in their ability to learn from the review process, to put comments on their work to use, and to respond to those comments in kind. If anonymous, closed peer review processes don't facilitate increased and improved scholarly discourse, what purposes do they serve? Gatekeeping, I'd argue, is a primary one; as almost all of the folks I've talked with over the last year about the future of scholarly publishing have insisted, peer review is necessary to ensuring that the work published by scholarly outlets is of sufficiently high quality, and anonymity is necessary in order to allow reviewers the freedom to say that an article should not be published.

In fact, this question of anonymity is quite fraught for most of the academics with whom I've spoken; they have repeatedly responded with various degrees of alarm to suggestions that their review comments might in fact be more productive delivered publicly, as part of an ongoing conversation with the author, rather than as a backchannel, one-way communication mediated by an editor. Such a position may be justifiable if, again, the primary purpose of peer review is quality control, and if the process is reliably scrupulous. However, as other discussants in the Nature web debate pointed out, blind peer review is not a perfect process, subject as it is to all kinds of failures and abuses, ranging from flawed articles that nonetheless make it through the system to ideas that are appropriated by unethical reviewers, with all manner of cronyism and professional jealousy inbetween.

It remains somewhat shocking to me that an academic indexing system such as the MLA Bibliography has not yet found a way to incorporate a technology like trackbacks to researchers' advantage. Trackbacks are an extremely useful mode of linking conversations across blogs.

Imagine blog number 1 has published a post that blog number 2 is commenting upon.

Blog number 2 obviously links to the post on blog number 1. In most blogging software, that link triggers a "ping" from blog number 2 to blog number 1, that registers

the original post as a trackback link, allowing readers of the original post to follow the conversation to the responding blog. While the implementation of such a technology within academic publishing requires programming skills far greater than mine, its applications are obvious.

Right now, when your most recent article appears, wherever it appears, and is indexed by the appropriate bibliographic services, it is generally mined for its title, author, publication data, keywords, and so on, but what if its bibliography were also indexed?

That bibliography currently allows us to trace conversations backward in time, but if the bibliographic information mined by the indexing software triggered a ping that was picked up by the records of those cited texts, each of those texts would thereafter carry,

in its indexed entry, evidence that the text was cited by you, among x number of other future scholars, each of whom responded to the text's argument in slightly different ways, thus enabling researchers to track conversations forward in time. (The sciences have of course been all over this for years via citation indexes. And of course the institutional reliance upon such citation indexes as a metric of any given article's "importance" in the field might be something worth subjecting to a bit of critical scrutiny.) In any case, the deployment of such forward-linking is made comparatively simple within an online publishing environment, in which trackbacks would have the added advantage of creating directly followable links among texts, materializing the ongoing nature of scholarly conversations, allowing any given text, via its descendants, to continue growing beyond its conclusion.

Versioning, as employed in most wiki software, would have a similar effect to that last, though within the individual text. In a wiki, any given page (here one selected at random from Wikipedia) includes not only its present state, but also its history, allowing a reader not only to revert the text to previous versions, but also to compare versions, to see what has changed. Such versioning might be useful in academic publishing. It makes no sense, after all, for electronic texts to mimic print by becoming fixed; electronic texts should be free to continue to grow and develop over time,but that change should somehow be marked within the text, made visible to readers. In this fashion, by enabling an author to continue working on a text even after its publication, but by making the history of changes to that text available, the process of an argument's growth and change could become part of the text itself. This would enable, in conjunction with commenting technologies, the processes of academic publishing to be radically changed, allowing authors to get new material into circulation much sooner. Scholars would no longer be at the mercy of the often appalling time-lags between a text's submission and acceptance, and between acceptance and publication.

So this is the point at which I want to talk very briefly about one of the experiments in electronic scholarly publishing that have taken root over the last few years: arXiv. arXiv, hosted by Cornell University's library, is an open-access "e-print" (or pre-print) repository through which scientists have increasingly disseminated and obtained working papers in physics, mathematics, computer science, and quantitative biology. Such papers are very often submitted to arXiv before they are submitted to journals — sometimes because the authors want feedback, and sometimes simply to get an idea out into circulation as quickly as possible. However, a growing number of influential papers have only been published on the arXiv server, and some have suggested that arXiv has in effect replaced journal publication as the primary mode of scholarly communication in physics. Such a mode of pre-print publication, adapted for the humanities, would allow articles and monographs to be posted relatively early in their life-spans, as pre-prints or even submissions, allowing the debate and discussion that they produce, and the shifts in the author's thinking that result, to take place in the open, as part of the process of the work itself.

I would argue that the kind of work that has in recent years been done by the scholarly monograph remains necessary to the humanities, regardless of how that monograph is actually read. While the individual chapters of many monographs might have been — and in many cases were — published as free-standing articles, by and large, those books' introductions could not have been published in any other form. The synthetic work that those introductions do — stepping back from local instances of the phenomenon under consideration to construct a broader landscape against which a large-scale argument can be made — remains crucial to the advancement of certain kinds of knowledge; such synthesis, moreover, requires the weight of the extended analysis only made feasible to this point by the expansive and yet subdividable nature of the book. This is not to say that the only arguments worthy of valorization in the humanities are those that come in large packages; in fact, much of the most important work in literary studies in recent years has been done in articles. I am simply arguing that the monograph remains valuable (and, indeed, necessary) as a venue for a certain form of intellectual work.

The problem, of course, is that the economics of academic publishing have become insupportable. After the dot-com crash, when numerous university endowments took a nosedive, two of the academic units whose budgets took the hardest hits were university presses and university libraries. And that second factor — the cuts in funding for libraries — represented a further budget cut for presses, as numerous libraries, already straining under the exponentially rising costs of journals, especially in the sciences, managed the cutbacks by reducing the number of monographs they purchased. The result for library users was perhaps only a slightly longer wait to obtain any book they needed, as libraries increasingly turned to consortial arrangements for collection-sharing, but the result for presses was devastating. Consider this, for instance: in the not-too-distant past, a press such as Harvard's could count on every library in the UC system purchasing a copy of every title they published. Since 2000, the rule has increasingly become that one school in the UC system will purchase a copy. And the result of that is that press after press has reduced the number of titles that it publishes, and that marketing concerns have often begun to outweigh scholarly merit in making publication decisions.

For a host of reasons, it seems apparent to me that for the monograph to maintain any viability into the future, many things have to change, and one of them is that the academic monograph must move online. Such a move could most easily be slotted into existing academic structures through electronic distribution via PDFs or print-on-demand technologies. However, as Bob Stein, the director of the Institute for the Future of the Book, has suggested, scholarship that is allowed to exceed the bounds of print, that takes full advantage of the technologies available to documents that are "born digital," promises to have the greatest effect on shaping what the future of scholarship might be. We've seen the leading edge of this future-shaping in academic blogging, which has enabled connections and conversations of the sort that formerly developed only at conferences or among colleagues to flourish across greater distances, for longer durations, and among more scholars than ever before.

What I argued on The Valve, as one stroke in a sketch of the electronic publishing scheme of the future—the "what do we want" question—is that blogging might have much to share with the born-digital monograph. Among the technologies that these digital texts can take advantage of are of course the apparent ones, such as the inexpensive inclusion of illustrations, among them still images, of course, but also audio and video clips, or the use of linking to create both webbed internal structures for texts and to bring external sources within the text's frame. There are other technologies, however, whose scholarly uses might not be so immediately apparent but that might produce the most radical change. Among these I'd argue that trackbacks, as a means parallel to bibliographies of tracing scholarly discussions not simply backward in time but also forward, might reshape the nature of doing research; that versioning, as a means of allowing a text to continue changing even after it's been published, might reshape the processes of academic publishing; and that comments, as a means of including conversation about a text within the text, might reshape the nature of peer-review.

At the request of the editors of The Valve, one of the most widely-read literary studies focused blogs, I wrote a lengthy consideration of the recommendations made by this panel, and extended one of those recommendations to reflect one possible future, in the hopes of opening up a larger conversation about where academic publishing ought to go, and how we might best take it there.
Many of the recommendations put forward by the MLA task force (and now concretized in the task force's final report, published in December 2006) were long in coming, and many stand to change tenure processes for the better; these recommendations include calls for departments:

— to clarify the communication of tenure standards to new hires via "memorandums of understanding";

— to give serious consideration to articles published by tenure candidates, thus decentering the book as the gold standard of scholarly production, and to communicate that expanded range of acceptable venues for publication to their administrations;

— to set an absolute maximum of six letters from outside evaluators that can be required to substantiate a tenure candidate's scholarly credentials, to draw those evaluators from comparable institutions rather than more prestigious ones, and to refrain from asking evaluators to make inappropriate judgments about the tenure-worthiness of candidates based on the limited portrait that a dossier presents.

These were extremely important recommendations, and ones to which I hope tenured faculty will begin to hold our departments and our institutions. For my purposes, however, there was one further recommendation that demanded emphasis, one that stands a significant chance of effecting great change not simply in how the academy tenures its faculty but in how those faculty do their work, how they communicate that work, and how that work is read both inside and outside the academy. This recommendation was hinted at in the IHE article:

"Sean Latham, associate professor of English and director of the Modernist Journals Project at the University of Tulsa, said that departments need to recognize that scholarship — good, bad and everything in between — is being produced online and needs to be evaluated without any media-based bias. ‘This process has begun without us,' he said.

"Latham — to knowing nods in the audience — joked about how some professors who favor print journals somehow ignore the fact that most of the print journals' readers these days are online, through various consortiums that make the journals available electronically. ‘If we read something through Project Muse, are we supposed to feel better because somewhere there is a print copy?' he asked."

Most of my audience at The Valve was already on board with Latham's point. He was precisely right that the vast majority of scholarly articles are being distributed and consumed in electronic format (as is evident in the citations of many of my students, who seem at moments a bit unaware that many journals actually have print existences!). He was also dead-on in attempting to nudge many senior (and many not-so-senior) faculty out of their continuing and unreasoning biases toward the primacy of print publication. But, at least as reported in IHE, Latham's interests largely focused on the online journal as a reputable venue for publication. My own interests revolved around the future of the monograph, and ways that it might be made sustainable in a new electronic venue. But the issues raised by the MLA panel called attention to two overarching questions:

What exactly do we in the humanities want the future of scholarship to look like, and what do we have to do in order to persuade ourselves, our senior colleagues, our departments, and our institutions — all of which tend, if unconsciously, toward an obstinate luddism — that such a future is not only acceptable but necessary?

I want to be clear at the outset that I'm not representing all sides of this debate. Instead, what I'm presenting here is a condensation of a series of polemics about the future of scholarly publishing that I've written over the last year or so, and a few brief glimpses of some experiments that might shed some light on directions for sustainable academic publishing futures. One of these experiments is, of course, my own: MediaCommons, a scholarly publishing network in media studies that I'm currently developing in conjunction with my co-coordinating editor, Avi Santo, and Bob Stein, the director of the Institute for the Future of the Book. Many of these thoughts are very much in process and MediaCommons is in some sense the laboratory in which we're working these ideas out.

(I should also note that for readers already working in digital media, much of this will sound like preaching to the choir. Much of what I'm advocating here is directly aimed at the traditional humanities; we're far, far behind the sciences in grappling with these issues of making scholarly publishing sustainable, and we desperately need to catch up.)

The MediaCommons experiment began for me with my own direct experience of the crisis in scholarly publishing: in December 2003, almost exactly 72 hours after I'd found out that the Cabinet at Pomona College had voted to grant me tenure, I received an email message from the editor of the scholarly press that had had my book manuscript under review for the previous ten months. It was not a good message: the press was declining to publish the book. This note, as encouraging as rejections can ever be, stressed to me that the fault, if fault there were, lay not with the manuscript but with the climate; the press had received two enthusiastically positive readers' reports, and the editor was likewise supportive of the project. The marketing guys, however, overruled him on the editorial board, declaring the book "a bad financial risk in the current economy."

This particular cause for rejection prompted two immediate responses: one most clearly articulated by my mother, who said "they were planning on making money off of your book?", in a tone making it clear that she was astonished that they would even think it possible. And second, from my colleague Matt Kirschenbaum at the University of Maryland, whose scholarly work is focused on digital textuality, who said that he could not understand why I could not simply take the manuscript and the two positive readers' reports and put the whole thing online, where it would likely garner a readership both wider and larger than the same manuscript in print would. He went on to indicate that, of course, he knew precisely why I wouldn't do such a thing:

"In fact," he wrote, "I completely understand why that's not realistic, and I'm not seriously advocating it. Nor am I suggesting that we all become our own online publishers, at least not unless that's part of a continuum of different options. But the point is, the system's broken and it's time we got busy fixing it. What ought to count is peer review and scholarly merit, not the physical form in which the text is ultimately delivered" (Kirschenbaum 12.16.03).

These two conversations forced me to stop thinking about scholarly publishing as a system that would simply bring my work into being, and instead approach it as the object of that work, thinking seriously about both the financial models and the material forms through which scholarship might best circulate. I began, in early 2004, to discuss in a fairly vague way the possibility of founding an all-electronic scholarly press, but the idea didn't take hold until relatively recently.