Excursus

Some solutions to life’s inconveniences can be forehead-slapping obvious.

A paradigm shift in academic publishing is occurring—a move from dead tree sources to online resources. As I have had occasion to comment (here and here), this is a Good Thing™. However, the old paradigm is not without its virtues, perhaps not all of which will be preserved in the new paradigm.

Searching online is not like searching by other means. For all its advantages, sometimes something can be lost. For example, I find it much harder to browse for DVDs on Amazon than it was browse for them in a DVD store. A certain potential for fortuitous serendipity has been noticeably diminished. With respect to dead tree journals, it was convenient to go to the departmental library and flip through the new journals for a good sense of what was coming out. My departmental library, however, has been canceling subscriptions as our university library is making these journals available online. Sensible, but a lost opportunity for browsing.

Now for the forehead slapping. Most journals that publish material online provide convenient RSS feeds of recent issues. (Most but not all—the venerable Journal of Philosophy doesn’t. I must write to the editor about this, and I encourage philosophers out there to do the same.) I spent twenty minutes this afternoon subscribing to feeds. Now I can browse recent issues from my newsreader in my office. Why didn’t I think of this before? The paradigm shift is still ongoing. And even I, as an editor who has actively promulgated it (by instituting a new publishing model for the Aristotelian Society with more to come) can yet remain blind to the obvious possibilities.

When I am done filling out my subscriptions, I will post a list of philosophy feeds.