Electronic Publishing

The editors and editorial board of Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide believe that electronic journals constitute the future of scholarly publishing, as commercial publishers are increasingly reluctant to underwrite "paper journals" and libraries no longer have the space to store back issues.

We also believe that electronic journals will soon grow into interactive forms of communication that will be more exciting than traditional journals. For example, our web site will contain a discussion feature that will enable readers to react directly to articles and reviews, without having to wait six months for the next issue. In due course, we intend to add other features that will make the journal more dynamic and fluent than existing paper journals.

To quote Hal Varian in The Journal of Electronic Publishing (http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/04-01/varian.html):

Each new medium has started by emulating the medium it replaced. Eventually the capabilities added by the new medium allow it to evolve in innovative, and often surprising, ways. Alexander Graham Bell thought that the telephone would be used to broadcast music into homes. Thomas Edison thought that recordings would be mostly of speech rather than music. Marconi thought that radio's most common use would be two-way communication rather than broadcast. The first use of the Internet for academic communication has been as a replacement for the printed page. But there are obviously many more possibilities.

Finally, and more mundanely, the instantaneity of electronic publishing eliminates the publisher's dependence on unreliable delivery systems and allows the money saved on postage and printing to be redirected toward enhancing the journal's quality.