Ecce Emendator: The Cost of Knowledge for Scholarly Editors

By Alan Rauch. As book publishing continues its steady decline, the number of rising scholars who are moving forward—to reappointment, renewal, and promotion—on the strength of peer-reviewed essays, rather than monographs, is trending upward. In fact, peer-reviewed articles are becoming the coin of the academic realm—the capital that effectively "purchases" tenure and promotion for an individual scholar.
Universities are fortunate to have a simple system for counting that capital: tallying scholarly articles, which comes at little or no expense to the institution itself. Let me underscore that. The cost, at least to academic departments, is negligible. See more...