POSSIBLE NEW FUTURES FOR OUR JOURNAL ON THE WORLD WIDE WEB

Religious Education, Winter 2005 by Hess, Mary E

Publishing the journal online poses several difficult challenges-not the least of which is to develop an economic model that is sustainable. Yet, as recent developments in the library world attest, the whole category of serials publishing is in deep economic trouble.7 A recent substantial investigation of the field of serials publishing, undertaken by the Oxford University Press, notes that:

At the last count, some 164,000 journal titles in some form or another could be identified; such is the volume of new knowledge to be distributed and the appetite for acquiring it. The institutions that subscribe to these titles (and most spending is by institutions) face challenges of affording just a fraction of the output. At the same time, subscription prices trend upwards so near-static budgets buy fewer titles. In this situation, academic librarians face a perennial dilemma of prioritizing titles to continue purchasing.8

Theological libraries are hard pressed to keep up with such demands, and individual congregations cannot even begin to subscribe to more than one or two such publications with which to resource their religious education leaders. One further implication of such statistics is that it is not simply access to the rapid proliferation of information that matters, but access that connects with a searcher's questions, that provides context, and that leads to appropriately linked materials.

Religious education scholars, with our "bi-locationality"-connected to communities of faith, as well as to scholarly communities-ought to be better positioned than most academic guilds to develop creative responses to such challenges. We may also discover whole new groups of people for whom our work would have relevance, thus expanding the potential "market" for the journal beyond anything previously imagined.

ENLARGE OUR FOCUS, RETRIEVE THE WIDER COMMUNITY OF PRACTITIONERS, AND INVITE A WIDER, MORE COMMUNAL NOTION OF PEER REVIEW

This comment brings me to the third avenue of possible development: inviting a wider, more communal notion of peer review by engaging in "open source" development of religious education materials.9 Chris Locke, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger listed very persuasively in The Cluetrain Manifesto (http://www.cluetrain.com/) a set of 95 theses in relation to the burgeoning Net community. Their first thesis was that "markets are conversations," and their second was that "markets consist of human beings." There is a huge conversation going on in the wider world that we in religious institutions ought to be participating in. Now is the time to take some risks and believe enough in what we are doing to move beyond older distribution models and into emerging media-particularly when these models support human relationality.

Imagine a website, for instance, where any church, any community of faith, could publish the things they had created to support religious learning and religious practice. This website would be freely accessible to the public, so that anyone could post resources-curriculum materials, bible studies, worship notes, and so on-and anyone could download them. The key would be that anyone publishing their materials through the site would need to agree-in the posting-that their resources would be there under a "creative commons" copyright agreement to stay free and accessible.10 They would be able to work out separate agreements with print publishers only as long as the original electronic publications remained free and open.