The rise of the internet has dramatically reduced the importance of print editions of academic journals. Almost all scholars nowadays search for and read articles online, sometimes printing them out. Libraries often discontinue subscriptions to print editions of journals that are available online. Many journals have abandoned print altogether. The transition to online journals, perhaps surprisingly, has rarely led to subscription costs being less than when they were available only in print (Cope and Kalantzis 2014:23).
Digital publishing has the potential to change the form and content of journals. Authors can now include links in their articles to relevant publications and websites and have online space to include supplementary material, photographic albums, interview transcripts, videos, and complex data sets. Journal editors can use social media and websites to create interactive forums in which readers and authors can exchange comments on the content of articles. Although some journals have taken advantage of these opportunities, most have not. Online editions of journals are often identical to what once appeared in print.
These technological changes have had a significant effect on the timeliness of publication. In many fields, especially in the sciences, scholars have complained that the slowness of journal publication hinders their ability to keep up with recent research findings. The advent of the internet has allowed manuscripts to become available earlier than was possible when journals came out only in print. In the sciences, prepublication drafts of unfinished manuscripts are often made available online. In all fields, “early view” publication is common, in which readers can see articles as soon as copy editing and typesetting are finished. Journal “issues” have become less relevant; instead, there are “content streams” of articles as they become ready for publication.
Increasing costs and the development of the internet have spurred a movement toward open access journals. Advocates of open access oppose the placement of journal articles behind a paywall in which content is available without cost only to those individuals affiliated with institutions with subscriptions. Scholars without such affiliations—many living in poor countries—often cannot afford the costs of seeing articles essential to their research and teaching. With open access, readers everywhere can see online the content of a journal. Librarians are often among the strongest advocates of open access because of their commitment to making research results widely available and their inability to acquire as many journals as they would like. The economics of publishing, however, make a transition to open access difficult for many journals in the humanities and social sciences.
Since the late 1990s, tightening library budgets have led to striking transformations in journal publishing. College and university libraries in the United States and elsewhere have had to deal with an explosion in the number of scholarly books and the rapidly rising costs of science journals published by commercial firms such as Elsevier and Springer. The result has often been reduced purchases of books and the discontinuing of some journal subscriptions. University presses in the United States in the 1990s could count on about 1,500 purchases of their books from libraries; the current figure is between 200 and 500. Subscriptions to academic journals are scrutinized much more carefully than was once the case. The situation worsened during the economic recession beginning in 2007. Many journal subscriptions were cut in subsequent years and not resumed during the slow economic recovery.
Editorial Work
As I settled into my new position, I was struck by the complexity of the work. The enormous literature on scholarly publishing provided only limited help in my struggles to learn what was involved in editing American Anthropologist. Editors have written a lot about topics such as peer review, measures of impact, digital publishing, access, economics, and ways to write publishable articles.1 But, as Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis (2014:37) observe, many aspects of “pre-publication processes are hidden in confidential spaces … invisible to public scrutiny.” The invisibility alluded to by Cope and Kalantzis refers primarily to day-to-day tasks of academic editing such as soliciting and assessing peer reviews, deciding whether to accept manuscripts submitted for potential publication, and writing decision letters to authors.
Most of what has been written about this kind of work is buried in journals in brief, hard-to-find from-the-editor essays. I have found only two book-length treatments about the daily activities of academic editors. Both were written two decades ago. Stephen McGinty’s Gatekeepers of Knowledge: Journal Editors in the Sciences and Social Sciences (1999) is based for the most part on interviews with editors about diverse topics related to their work. While the interviews are interesting, McGinty does not attempt to provide the thick descriptions characteristic of ethnographic accounts. Furthermore, McGinty’s goal of making generalizations about academic editing leads him to discuss only briefly the operations of many different journals. As a result, readers do not find out much about the intricacies associated with editing any one journal. Andrew Abbott’s Department & Discipline: Chicago Sociology at One Hundred (1999), in contrast, includes long chapters about editing the American Journal of Sociology. Abbott provides intriguing examples of the ways different editors solicited and reviewed manuscripts and carefully describes their strategies in dealing with controversies concerning the content of the journal. Although Department & Discipline includes a chapter about what Abbott calls the “modern form” of the American Journal of Sociology, most of the book is about the journal’s history.
American Anthropologist
In some ways, American Anthropologist fits well into conventional classifications of scholarly journals. As is typical of major journals sponsored by professional associations, AA is highly selective, has a large circulation, and is generally regarded as a prestigious venue for publication. AA, however, has two distinctive features. First, the topics and methods in AA articles are exceptionally diverse. Second, the journal is unusually magazinelike with many pages devoted to sections other than research articles.
I have sometimes thought that one could study just about anything and call it anthropology. While this is an exaggeration, the subject matter of anthropology includes an extraordinary range of topics. The subject matter of anthropology and the nomenclature for its subfields differ considerably from country to country. In the United States, anthropology is ordinarily divided into four subfields. These are—in order of the number of practitioners—sociocultural anthropology, archaeology, biological anthropology, and linguistic anthropology. The inclusion of these quite different subfields in one discipline can be understood to a certain extent by examining what anthropologists were doing when the field became a separate discipline in the United States. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, anthropologists in the United States regarded their general goal as the description of human societies past and present. Their research examined technology, social organization, and ideology in recent times (sociocultural anthropology) and the distant past (archaeology), physical characteristics (biological anthropology), and languages (linguistic anthropology). In what has become a cliché, anthropology came to be described as a holistic discipline that showed relationships among culture, human biology, and language.
From the beginnings of anthropology in the United States, the subjects examined and methods used in studies in the four subfields were so unlike one another that their coexistence in a single discipline must have mystified outside observers. In the first years of the twentieth century, sociocultural anthropologists were interviewing American Indians about their customs, archaeologists were digging up material remains from long ago, biological anthropologists—then called physical anthropologists—were measuring skulls, and linguistic anthropologists were devising ways to describe and analyze unwritten languages. As time passed, the particular topics and methods in each of the subfields changed. Sociocultural anthropologists