I've been thinking a lot in the past few days about the new Journal of Information Technology in Social Change. At the recent Nonprofit Technology Conference, I attended a session about it that was led by Michael Gilbert, and lately Michelle Murrain has been engaging Michael and other members of the community in an online dialogue on this topic.

For me, the two most pressing questions are:

1)  Will the new journal have any significant impact on best practices in our field, if it is not disseminated free of charge to interested readers, in the spirt of open content?

2)  Will the new journal be financially viable if it is distributed free of charges, and therefore lacks a revenue stream to support it?

This seems like an excellent case study for the same issues that trouble me about Yochai Benkler's model of the networked economy.  Making our information and insights freely available to the world is very workable, if we all have day jobs as tenured professors of law.  Of course, if we did all have day jobs as tenured professors, we'd probably also have budgets for purchasing subscriptions to the new journal.

I think that equal weight should be given to the claims of open content and financial sustainability, but I don't how to resolve them.  Meanwhile, John McNutt*has wondered whether there's enough rigorous research in the field to fill the new journal, which leads me to wonder whether it's premature to launch it just now.

Still, I think that it's a very healthy sign that the journal is up and running, and I'm delighted to see the thoughtful, non-acrimonious dialogue that is now in progress.  By serving as an occasion for fruitful discussion, the Journal of Information Technology in Social Change is already begining to justify its existence.


*  By the way, John has just been appointed to a full tenured professorship, which at least proves that somebody can make a decent living from research on nonprofit technology.






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