I thank C.G. and Menachem for their thoughtful comments regarding Tradition at the Seforim blog (see “The Ongoing Debate on the Usage of Print vs. Electronic Journals: Perspective of an Ivy League PhD Student,” available here). Since I understood the post to be using the example of Tradition for a larger phenomenon of deciding between print and electronic journals, I will also try to relate to this ongoing discussion in the context of explaining Tradition’s situation. I should note from the outset that I write only from my limited experience and perspective as the online editor, and that these views are strictly my own, although they have certainly been shaped by discussions with Tradition’s editor, Rabbi Shalom Carmy, and Rabbi Basil Herring, executive Vice President of the Rabbinical Council of America, publisher of Tradition.

When I first became Tradition’s online editor this past spring, I asked the same questions regarding making Tradition free online. C.G. raises the issue in particular with regard to university students, who get electronic access to many journals through their university. I initially raised it, however, in the context of offering it online to the wider public.

This issue has been raised multiple times, by readers and editorial board members alike. Everyone would like to see Tradition available to as wide of an audience as possible. Unfortunately, it has been deemed unfeasible, at least for now, for the following reasons:

1) Despite the fact that Tradition is edited on a volunteer-basis, producing the journal 4 times a year costs tens of thousands of dollars. Rising printing and mailing costs as well as other factors have increased the cost of print journals, which is one of the major factors propelling different journals to publishing an online-only journal. While producing an online journal still costs money, the costs are definitely reduced – you do not have to pay for paper, ink, design, layout, shipping, etc…

If we made Tradition entirely free online, however, the feeling is that the print subscription would drastically decrease, especially with younger subscribers who are willing to print out journal articles for shabbat reading, and thereby undermine the financial stability of the journal.

Many people, however, continue to find a printed journal as a more enjoyable reading experience, as they do with magazines like The New Republic, Commentary Magazine, etc. This was, indeed, the concluding point of the article in The New Yorker by Princeton University professor Anthony Grafton, linked at the Michtavim blog. Yet the initial cost of printing even one copy of the journal is quite expensive, and one needs to preserve a minimum number of print subscribers in order to maintain the financial viability of the printing.

To a small extent, costs could be limited by reducing the number of editions published per year, but then you lose out on the joy of receiving a new edition on a more frequent basis, and the seasonal dialogue that it generates.

2) Tradition’s sponsor, the Rabbinical Council of America (RCA), does not have the funding to entirely absorb these costs. While Tradition Fellows generously cover an important amount of these costs, we must still pass some cost on to the reader. We are, of course, regularly pursuing other sources of revenue, and our outside funding has increased substantially in recent years, but these resources are finite. Tradition also has to be sensitive to not accepting money from organizations or individuals that might attach ideological or editorial strings to their contributions.

If anyone, however, knows of potential donors or foundations, we’d of course be happy to hear from you.

Given that information, I proposed making a number of changes that we have adopted including offering online-only subscriptions for a reduced price, and giving a further reduction for students, which we have now implemented at www.TraditionOnline.org. We continue to have reduced prices for multi-year subscriptions.

We of course want to expand our reach deeper into the academic arena, and are currently working with our institutional subscribers to increase electronic access to affiliates of their universities, which we hope will ultimately happen, in one form or another, in the coming months. In addition to my duties at Tradition and as a Ram in Yeshivat Hakotel, I myself am also pursuing a PhD in Jewish Philosophy at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and understand that our generation of students and professors prefer taking advantage of their electronic library priviliges.

In many ways, the rising costs of printing and digitalization have forced journals to ask themselves whether they are a magazine or a research journal. The former cater to a more popular audience, and expect subscriptions from a larger audience while seeking profits. The latter limits themselves to a more limited, academic audience, and therefore mostly seek library subscriptions (at extremely high prices) to cover the costs of issues that come out on a less frequent basis. I do not agree with C.G.’s assessment that academic journals exclusively (or almost exclusively) impact currents of thought. I think magazines with a scholarly tone but a clear “public intellectual” agenda have a tremendous amount of impact, like First Things.

Having never discussed this with the editors, I’d venture to say that Tradition is somewhere in between a magazine and a journal, leaning more toward the latter in both its frequency and tone. It is a scholarly (though not purely academic) journal with a public service agenda, addressed to an intellectual religious community rather than exclusively a professional academic coterie.

Whatever one might make of that assessment, it remains clear, however, that we do not publish Tradition for-profit, and continue to publish it, lishmah, for the sake of disseminating and encouraging Orthodox Jewish thought.

Another initiative was to “offer more,” so to speak, for the subscription. In addition to creating the website to increase availability, we are now in the final stages of an extensive process to digitize all 50 years of Tradition in an indexed and searchable PDF online archives. The alpha release of the full archives will hopefully happen in the next month. When that happens, individual subscribers (both print and online-only) will have full access to all 50 years of Tradition, and non-subscribers will be able to purchase individual articles for a small fee (again comparable to other magazines), as they can do already for those issues currently online.

As Grafton noted in his piece, the OCR technology is far from perfect, and produces a number of typos, particularly when irregular fonts are used, like in footnotes. Hebrew can also be a problem. Nonetheless, the overall technology remains wonderful, and having spent numerous hours this past week going through the archives online, I can testify to the blessings of digitalization, and I think that this will be a wonderful service to both the academic and broader communities.

I should also note that all of Rav Soloveitchik’s writings that were first published in Tradition will be available for free to the wider public. (For copyright reasons, The Lonely Man of Faith will be available in a read-only format).

Especially given access to 50 years of Tradition, we think that our subscription prices are pretty reasonable. You can check them out here.

Another new and popular phenomenon common to magazines, but not to journals, involves special online-only features on the website. Our new books of interest section has already begun and is in the process of being expanded, and we hope in the next months to have blogs and other online-only features, all of which will be available for free to the wider public. Obviously, these changes also cost money, and we have worked to procure grants for the archives scanning (over 1300 articles!).

Anyone interested in sponsoring or dedicating other features of TraditionOnline should please contact me.

When these changes go into effect, we plan to explore online advertising, which we hope will create revenue to keep subscription costs down or even reduce them. Of course, we want to make sure that all ads are appropriate for our site, and that our intellectual and religious integrity is not compromised by any of our financial affiliations. That is why we have, for now, elected not to use Google ads.

In other words, I think within its resources, Tradition is doing a thoughtful job of balancing its agenda, different audiences, and new technology. If at some point we can make Tradition available for free online, we will do it. We continue to explore different options, seeking to spread our articles to as broad of an audience as possible. Please feel free to contact me directly if you have further questions or suggestions.

On a separate but related note, another element of the online world is that it expands the opportunities of different people to be involved with the journal. TraditionOnline is looking for limited number of qualified volunteers to assist with certain editorial elements of our expanding online presence. If you are interested, please be in touch with me.

I recently had an enjoyable conversation with a former roommate and friend, back from our days at Yeshivat Kerem B’Yavneh, who is currently nearing completion of a doctorate at the graduate school of an Ivy League institution in computer science, about his views on using print vs. electronic journals. Our discussion centered on the notion that a journal Tradition, published by the Rabbinical Council of America (RCA), a leading institution of American Modern Orthodox Judaism, charges a fee of $25.00 per year (or $15.00 to students) for non-Tradition subscribers. Parallel journals from within the Modern Orthodox community, like The Meorot Journal (formerly The Edah Journal), published by Yeshivat Chovevei Torah and the Torah u-Madda Journal, published by the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary (RIETS) of Yeshiva University, are published in both print and electronic formats, thus allowing their publications to be read by individuals from throughout and beyond the geographic and ideological world of Orthodox Judaism.

Below is a lightly-edited version of a letter that I received from my roommate and friend C.G., posted at the Seforim blog with his express permission.

Dear Menachem,

Regarding our conversation about Tradition, we discussed whether graduate students use online journal access through their universities. In my experience, not only do they use the online access, they only use the online access. I know that in 4 years as a PhD student at Columbia I have looked up an article that wasn’t online exactly once. There is just too much material online and too many accessible journals for me to bother going to the library to photocopy a journal that is behind the times. (The one time I did go was for a seminal article from the 70’s that it is de rigueur in my field to cite.) If I had to pay for the article, even a few dollars, there is no way I would have done so. My experience is that other PhD students take the same approach – for all intents and purposes, an article that isn’t freely available to us online doesn’t exist. (By free, I mean “free to me,” as in either free or available through a University’s e-journals program.) Free abstracts isn’t much of a help either, if the article isn’t free. It isn’t even that I’m particularly cheap – it simply makes no economic sense for me to pay. There is always another article you can cite, and considering the hundreds of articles I read before each paper I write, the cost of a few dollars per article would add up pretty fast. It’s the equivalent of replacing a library with a bookstore – if I have to pay for every book I read, I’ll read a lot fewer books, and if most of the books I want are free but a few cost money, it would take a lot to interest me in the ones that I need to pay for.

The New York Times discovered this recently; charging even a small fee for their opinion pages drastically reduced the impact of their columnists on popular thought, which is part of the reason that they are suddenly free again. (Incidentally, they were smart enough to make themselves free to academics even when they were charging the general public). New York Times continues to charge (the general public) for archived articles and I guarantee that this has reduced the frequency that archived articles are cited by non-academic researchers. New York Times can afford to do this because the fact is that they were the paper of record for more than a century and if you are researching news from the 1930’s you don’t have a lot of other choices. However, a small journal that isn’t widely known outside of a relatively small circle doesn’t have the same power.

I will admit that $15 a year is a fairly nominal cost, and if I was planning on citing Tradition a lot I would pay it, much as I pay for various magazines. However, the key here is that I would only do that if I already knew that Tradition was full of material for me. If I came across a Tradition article and I wasn’t familiar with the journal or didn’t think I’d be citing many Tradition articles, I’d just click along to the next result on Google. This is the reason that it’s standard practice in my field to make your own articles available online for free – the easier it is for someone to get it, the more likely it will have an impact. I also concede that my field (computer science) is more “online” than other fields. However, a lot of my friends are in graduate programs and an informal straw poll says that the same is true for other fields. A friend in psychology told me that an article that isn’t free online “doesn’t exist” and a close friend who was researching a Jewish Studies topic in conjunction with the chair of a university department told me that anything he needed to pay for or even needed to go to the library for wasn’t worth his time when there were ten other articles that were free.

My opinion: Tradition’s current pricing is perfectly fine for a magazine. If that’s the model they are aiming for, it’s entirely sustainable, and it’s what most magazines do, as their goal is to maximize subscriptions and revenue. However, an academic journal usually has a different goal of having an impact on the currents of thought in the broader field, and in that respect, if even 25% of researchers are like me and my friends (though, to be honest, I suspect that 95% are) then Tradition is making a big mistake.

Just my opinion of course. Be well,

C.G.