----------------- HES POSTING ----------------- 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 ------------ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ------------ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]