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The mail about the Electric Press seems to be an excellent occasion  
for introducing something new in our discussions among historians of  
economic thought. 
 
The suggestion is: why not introduce a fully refereed, high quality  
HET journal on the web? A real international one? 
 
1. It seems that we have our webmasters. As far as I am able to figure  
out, the people running EH-net are very good. 
 
2. We have a real international organization. There will be no  
difficulty in finding editors and members of an editorial board in  
Europe, America (both Latin and North), Australia, Japan. (I have no  
idea about the rest of the world, but I have read some excellent  
papers written by Chinese scholars.) 
 
The background of the suggestion is the ongoing serials crisis.  
Prices of academic journals are still rising at an incredible speed.  
I have no figures, but I would not be suprised at all when our  
relatively cheap journals were crowded out by the Elsevier journals. 
 
(Some information for those who are not fully aware of what is going  
on. Prices of academic journals rise at an averagespeed of 12% per  
year. Librarians are cancelling subscriptions of the journals in a  
minor field in order to protect the "mainstream" journals.) 
 
The costs of providing an on-line journal cannot be too high. As  
has been said, we have the organization, we know who are the  
internationally acknowledged experts in our field and we all believe  
that high quality is a thing we should strive for. 
 
I have written a lot about the serials crisis; unfortunately for many 
of you, in Dutch. But since Elsevier is a Dutch company, you can be sure 
that Elsevier knows everything about my suggestions to limit its monopoly  
power. 
 
Summarizing, next to the fine dicussions between Jr. and Patrick  
Gunning and all the others about public goods (I like the discussion)  
I would very much appreciate quality articles on my favourite web  
site. 
 
Happy Christmas, experience the New Year in in the European way  
(hard to explain, but be loveable!) and think about my suggestion: a  
new fully international (digital) journal in the History of Economic  
Thought.   
 
Henk Willem Plasmeijer 
University of Groningen 
 
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