It is a tad unnerving stumbling upon something that you wrote 10 years ago, perhaps in haste, which has become part of your permanent online record. Here is something I wrote 10 years ago in response to a position paper about the future of Law Journals. Was I wrong? (Perhaps the only thing that history teaches us is that we don’t learn anything from history)..
From: Craig J Bellamy (s_cjb9@eduserv.its.unimelb.edu.au)
To: LAW SCHOOL.FACULTY & STAFF(Hibbitts)
Date: 12/1/96 1:03am
Subject: Last Writes Response
Dear Associate Professor Hibbitts,
I am a post-grad student at The University of Melbourne and I am just completing a masters degree on historical authorship on the web and CD ROM. I am comparing how the normal practices of book based authorship compare to historical hypertext productions. I have just read your article on print journals and I will offer a brief response.
Firstly, the article is very rich in ideas, but the thesis is so fundamentally flawed that I do not know where to begin. All I can offer is a brief statement as the time an effort to go through the paper systematically is beyond the scope of the paper’s worth. Firstly, you introduce the history of the law journal effectively and set out to state a problem. The problem is that there are too many journals, they are edited by “students”(who you see incompetent) and the editorial process is a bottle neck (and does not add any value to the publication process.) You then state that there is growing dissatisfaction within the profession concerning journals. My question to you is, how do you know? You use two or three examples of complaints, but there are about 400 journals! To introduce a problem like this, surely you have to at least get a broader selection. I am sure that there are a few people dissatisfied with the United States health system, but it does not mean you close it down.
You assert that the web and information technology is cheap or somehow free (as I type this into my $3000 computer), and then you go on with a whole bunch of inconsistencies. One is that you claim that it is difficult to get an article in a journal because they are always “filled up” then a few pages later you claim that electronic publication is effective because articles do not have to be put in it as space “filler”. You then claim that self-publishing is going to fix all our problems and use an example from 1665 to somehow legitimization through historical precedent. (They also burned witches during this period, perhaps we should revert to this as well.) You are basically claiming that legal editors serve little or no use and students are corrupt and incompetent. Not a bad thesis, and you wouldn’t be the first professor to claim this. But I am only a new post-grad student and I know virtually nothing about legal practice nor journals. What I can recognize is a good paper, a good thesis and a well argued point of view, and if I may be so bold, your paper reflect precious little of this. Surely this proof alone is enough to convince you of some of the huge dangers in self-publishing. Who is perfect?
[Craig Bellamy
University of Melbourne]
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