*19* written but unpublished articles

I was again surprised this morning when counting the number of already written but unpublished pieces on my computer. There are now 19 of them, and two of them were written at the AUC Tahrir Campus, which we left in 2008.

Look, I’m not saying there’s no benefit to anthologies or to special topic journal issues. There are certainly some benefits to this, and some editors may be especially skilled at compiling such collections (I was the third editor myself on The Speculative Turn, and I do think it was nice to put all those pieces together in one volume).

But remember, the LP record album also has advantages. Nonetheless, it was born in a different technological era that has been superseded. I want to be able to buy songs individually, and thanks to the MP3 revolution that is now quite easy. And by the same token, there is really no compelling reason why an article should still be unpublished 4 years after it was completed, and perhaps 3 years after final proofreading. This happens due to some of the following reasons:

•many projects work at the speed of the slowest contributor

•many academic publishers are too slow

•articles are still treated as though they must travel in convoys (an artifact of the paper-and-glue era), when in most cases it would be perfectly fine just to post articles individually as they are accepted.

If I were founding a journal right now, that’s how I’d do it: As soon as an article is accepted, it goes on the website, and website subscribers receive immediate free notification. Page numbers (needed for academic c.v. seriousness purposes; some Deans and Provosts think you’re pulling a scam if no page numbers are involved) are to be assigned sequentially during each calendar year. I wouldn’t charge anything for the articles. You’d probably need a tough review process to help counter the continuing perception that web-based journals aren’t tough enough given how cheap it is to post something online.