[Buddha-l] Shingon sutras

[Jim Peavler]

On Oct 21, 2005, at 10:17 PM, Richard P. Hayes wrote:

> On Sat, 2005-10-22 at 08:55 +0800, Wong Weng Fai wrote:
>
>> Only through peer-reviewed publications in recognized
>> journals (which are helluva expensive to subscribe to), conferences
>> (which are helluva expensive to attend) or in nicely printed books
>> (which are helluva expensive to buy) can it be considered of any 
>> academic
>> standing (as well as determining your next pay increment and/or
>> administrative, i.e. power, position in your university).

Way back in the early 70's I was part of a committee of the Mediaeval 
Society of America that was trying to help solve the problem of the 
terrible expense of academic publishing. It was about the time of the 
first great paper crisis. The leader of our group was one John 
Stalworthy, who, I believe, was head of the Oxford University Press (if 
memory serves -- which it often doesn't). This was before the day of 
online publishing, so our method was Xerox microfilm.

We did publish a lot of material using computers in those days, but 
online publishing didn't really get going until scientists in DARPA 
began using it a decade later. (I was a scientific editor/publisher in 
the late 70s and early 80s and had the pleasure of working on the 
development of computer publishing and electronic libraries, including 
SGML and HTML.) The scientific world has become pretty good at 
electronic publishing by now.

As the paragraph by Wong Weng Fai above states, the problem has 
apparently not been solved for most academics (outside the technical or 
scientific world). I think academics, in the liberal arts particularly, 
are amongst the most liberal socially and the most conservative 
technically of any group I can think of. In the 60s, when I was trying 
to learn how to produce my dissertation using a main-frame computer, 
many of my professors and peers thought it was evil to even think of 
doing such a thing. I had dissertation advisors who fought against my 
doing so on grounds I never understood. Why couldn't they just think of 
the computer as a fancy typewriter, I asked. I eventually managed to 
get the whole thing in a computer format and printed out on good 
quality paper in a type-writer font so that no one who didn't know it 
had been produced on a computer could recognize is as "technically" 
produced.

I suspect there are still folks in the languages, history, philosophy, 
and other liberal arts who don't read things online, and who would not 
give much respect to anything published online. Can one get the dreaded 
tenure if one has only published online, even if all the publications 
were refereed by academically sound referees?