Louis Proyect wrote: > > One form of communication has enormously democratic implications while > the other serves as an elitist club open only to those who have been > accepted into the priesthood. In Gutenberg's day, it was the Catholic > church. Today it is tenured academia.) > > --- > > NY Times, June 26, 2004
> The journal Dr. Nicolelis chose — PLoS Biology, a publication > of the Public Library of Science — aims to do just that by putting > peer-reviewed scientific papers online free, at the Web site > www.plosbiology.org. Still PEER-reviewed. That is, still dominated by tenured faculty. The internet is having a great impact, but what Lou describes here is something happening within "tenured academia." Tenure (unless something else than the internet impacts it) will continue to be based on _peer-reviewed_ publication. What is different is that the publications of tenured faculty will have a (potentially) widened circulation. There is one possibility I see in the social sciences and humanities. There are too damn many scholarly books being published. Web publication would put the emphasis where it ought to be, on articles. In the physical and biological sciences the emphasis always has been on articles rather than books, so I don't see web publication making any great difference there in the structure of academia. Carrol
