I think it will nonetheless remain true, though, that some scholarly ideas are bigger than an article will allow for.  So how might we imagine a genre of electronic publication that will permit the dissemination and reading of those Big Ideas?

Well, I wasn’t just thinking of self-publication, just using examples of it in my comment above; but I’d say yes. The very nature of academic writing involves self-editing, and webpages are open to correction and revision at any point. Registering a page with search engines is advertising and promotion, and putting it online is a form of distribution (not as obvious as having a pile of your books in the campus bookstore, perhaps, but how many titles get that sort of exposure?). In terms of stability and sustainability, I’d bet on a personal site over a commercial or institutional one any day; individuals have a vested interest in keeping their work available in a stable location for as long as they can. If sustainability matters to you, you don’t let your links rot.

As for peer-review, that’s obviously a bit trickier. We’re part of an informal kind of review right here and now, leaving comments on a fellow academic’s site, implying that her words have value to us. If KF posted a formal paper here, and drew our attention to it, and we left comments about it, then our ‘review’ would become part of its publication process - just at a different point than it would have occurred in print publication. (Perhaps not that different: reviews after publication are important in getting a book noticed, as are citations for articles.)

There’s nothing to stop us, either, from asking a colleague to critique a paper before we put it on our own site - or from sending it to a complete stranger for their comments - and noting their reviews on the page itself. But we haven’t really seen this happen, perhaps because post-publication commentary (or lack of it) is considered just as, or more, important. Or perhaps everyone’s just waiting for the formal peer review machinery to spring into existence before they dip their toes in the water. What I was trying to say above is that it’s more likely to emerge as a result of people testing the waters. Worrying about the distinction between publishing and making public might make us less likely to try, when what should really matter is getting our words and thoughts out there for others to read and consider.

I will add, though, a newly-minted comment from my own non-senior experience. I’ve been an advocate of academic web-publishing for over five years, ever since it was my job to nudge a bunch of established senior academics to cough up a few papers for a departmental website. I did what I could to lead by example, putting past papers of my own online one-by-one, some of them mined from my supply of unpublished postgrad writings. I’ve been doing it for long enough now to have identified the real obstacle to doing more of it - the thing that stops me from putting every academic paper I write (and have ever written) online right away.

It’s not the copyright concerns, or the risk of plagiarism, or the small chances of being noticed, or even the practical obstacle of turning them into attractive webpages, though all of those play a part. It’s letting go.

The first paper I put online was easy: it was the revamped version of my honours thesis, published six years earlier and long out-of-print. Putting it online extended its useful life. Later ones had also already appeared in other forms: reworked as book chapters, for example. And some were never intended to be published as journal articles - one-off lectures, consultancy reports - but still had potential value, value that could only be realised by putting them on the web. Most of these are now sitting on my site.

The hard ones were - and are - anything unpublished but potentially publishable. Some are old pieces that I always meant to work up into articles, but because of the mundanities of personal circumstance never did. Others are new pieces that with about the same amount of work could go either way: onto the web or into print. Putting them online would mean letting go of their traditional academic potential (for advancing their particular arguments, the state of knowledge in their field, and my own career), and trusting that their online potential will be greater.

That’s a difficult judgement to make; it depends not only on the perceived value of the work in question, but on attitudes towards online publishing in one’s own discipline, one’s own institution, and across academia as a whole, all of which can be hard for individuals to judge. It’s hard even for those of us who concentrate on online matters - who are advocates of online publishing - because we have to keep reminding ourselves that not everyone is there yet.

We are, I suppose, in the same situation as the music companies, wondering when to bet the farm on the Next Big Thing. Music execs aren’t idiots; they can see what’s coming. But they have an awful lot invested in how things have traditionally been done; and so do we.

So what to do? Well, I would argue that we do exactly what we’re doing now. Get a site; get a blog. Write on it. Experiment with it. Encourage others, students and colleagues alike, to do the same. Exploring the medium through informal work allows us to get a feel for its formal potential. At some point we’ll look around us, see that the real discussion, debate, and advancement of knowledge in our fields is happening online (just as scientists are seeing with online pre-prints), and realise that moving our formal work into this environment is no longer the career suicide (/end of academia/collapse of civilization) we once thought it was. And then everything changes.

Does this movement need formalisation, organisation? I’m not so sure; that way lies a culture of insiders and outsiders. Better, I think, just to do it, and to tell others about what we’re doing. After all, most of us only got into this after seeing other people’s sites and blogs; the number who claim to have invented weblogging thankfully seems to have peaked.

That said, if there’s a practical way I can help to spread the word, I’ll give it a try. As long as it doesn’t involve banners.

That’s inchoate, I know, but that’s what I’m thinking about: a “grassroots” (sorry, too much campaign coverage) of scholars advocating for electronic publishing. Exactly what might such an organization aim to achieve? Let’s hear some ideas.