I grew up in a family of journalists, so I take the daily routines of writing, editing, and producing a publication as a given. It's hardly a surprise that, after graduate school, I wound up in academic publishing, mostly working on journals. Yet it's always a shock to me how little most academics understand about the nitty-gritty of publishing—after all, one of the things that inspired me to get a doctorate was the realization that, “Hey, ‘publish or perish’ is already my motto!”
It took me a while to see that when most Americans think of serials publishing, their visuals derive from things like the movie All the President's Men (1976) or the TV show Lou Grant (1977–1982—itself inspired by All the President's Men). Okay, maybe, if we're lucky, they think of His Girl Friday (1940).1 They imagine big, open rooms full of desks (Fig. 1) where...