(at least not much)
Jamie Hubbard, 2008
1. Ideological: I recently decided to publish as much of my work as possible online. The basic reason for this goes back to my initial fascination with the openness of the web, the willingness of programmers to give software away freely and share games, files, pics, and information of every sort. What wasn't given away freely was pirated. . . I am, after, all, a member of the Steal This Book (New York : Pirate Editions; Distributed by Grove Press, 1971, but you can steal it by clicking on the above link) generation. I have also always been convinced that sharing and the free exchange of ideas is the essence of civilization, revolution, and the intellectual life. Hence my long interest in making available digital versions of Buddhist texts. Computers and the net were made for this (ahhh, to think that it began with DARPA and ARPANET!!), and the explosion of the WorldWideWeb makes it so obvious.
2. Economic: Then too I am increasingly frustrated with the economics and logistics of traditional academic publishing. With print runs of 300-600 copies in hardback only destined primarily for dusty shelves in research libraries the finances don't add up very well, and while I realize that my university salary comes from the fact that I publish, the royalty checks of $17.50 every few years don't excite me too terribly much. Combined with the very little editing that books typically receive and the demand for writers to do everything from produce camera-ready copy to make their own indices, it just seems like a waste of time and energy to support the middle-people of the academic press. Sometimes it seems to me that about 50% of the time required to publish comes at the end, fine-tuning every reference, making sure that all the reference styles are proper and uniform, etc. I wish all of my good friends in the publishing industry well, but I can no longer justify research publishing in that way.
a. Freedom--one part of me also wants freedom from the tyranny of the perfect citation and even the footnote, so much an important part of the academic apparatus. I remember my graduate advisor Minoru Kiyota describing the elation and the fear he felt when he wrote a thinly-disguised autobiography, noting that his comments and observations would have to "stand on their own," without the authority of a footnote for security. Similarly, Hakamaya Noriaki once noted how impressed his audience was when he waved pages of reference handouts in front of them, but how when he spoke his own mind they called it demagoguery. So we'll see. . . likely I'll keep the crutches, but without peer reviewers looking over my shoulder who knows where I will go.
3. Greater ease and utility w/ live references; And, of course, online pubs are much easier to search and reference, they can include links to the citations, etc. Of course, this latter aspect has actually made much of the "post-production" job of prepping the work to be put online harder (every time I link to an online edition of a Pali text or some other reference it seems to disappear, and I need to keep local copies, re-editing them so that the links still work, etc.), but so be it.
4. Stolen texts taste better: Web 2.0 Finally, I am interested in Web 2.0 approaches to online publishing, perhaps Wiki-style, in which others can use "social tagging" to comment on and extend whatever it is that I put out there--it is this interaction, after all, that constitutes the intellectual sharing and wrangling that I mentioned above. Some journal articles generate a lot of buzz, others generate the occasional friendly comment that colleague so-and-so saw your article, "Congratulations." It would be nice to actually have some give-and-take on the stuff we labor over.
5. Some caveats; First of all, buyer beware. Most of the stuff that I will put out here is not peer-reviewed (except for what I am ripping from old pubs), so you get it as is. In particular there will no doubt be discrepancies in reference styles even within the same document (I am particularly bedeviled by the many different ways to reference sections of the Pali canon) and infelicitous writing. So too some of the embedded links will occasionally not work (the notion of "stable links" is slowly making its presence felt) or the material might come up in a slightly unsightly manner--sorry, but the point of a reference is to get the reader to the materials and if the online versions that I provide are not always so well done, well . . . c'est la your hard luck. Secondly, and though it is against my nature, I will try to respect copyrights and so sometimes a link will be to another online publication that you cannot get to unless you have paid access (JSTOR, for example) or I will put up a .pdf that is password protected. In most of these cases if you let me know I can get you a copy of the article. So too I have often saved references locally that I have found online and link to my locally stored versions because online sources often disappear or the hard-coded URL changes, etc. In these cases I also will give the original website link where possible. Perhaps I will have more to way another time. . . perhaps you have something to say? Send me a message: jhubbard@smith.edu