Breaking Paper's Stranglehold on the Academy

While science researchers have embraced open access publishing and online journals, their brethren (and sistren) in the humanities remain enamored with chopping down trees and slicing them into sheets. Once these sheets (or pages) get covered with enough inky marks, the professor in question is eligible for tenure. It's an excellent system.

While most journals now offer online access to subscribers (often through databases like Project Muse and JSTOR), these journals are still printed, bound, and distributed. Purely electronic journals have yet to match their printed compatriots in prestige and authority, but USC's Institute for the Future of the Book wants to change that. Its new MediaCommons program is a test bed for purely digital academic publishing projects.