AustLit

'In this issue of Cultural Studies Review, Sean Sturm considers Ruth Barcan’s book, Academic Life and Labour in the New University: Hope and Other Choices, in which she describes the contemporary university as a ‘a palimpsest: a scholarly community, a bureaucracy and a transnational corporation’. It would seem that academic journals might be similarly palimpsestic. Publications in refereed journals offer an opportunity to share original scholarly research, to review and debate research published elsewhere, and (in this journal at least) occasions for intellectual creativity and exploration. At the same time, articles in refereed journals are subject to relentless systems of quantification which both measure individual productivity and are fed into metrics of aggregation which, in turn, are harvested to produce rankings which are then key marketing messages for the promotion of particular corporate entities. And, more often than not, the journals we read and publish in are themselves products of transnational corporations. Although not this journal.' (Introduction)