Why would you want to publish in a journal where your article will end up behind a Sage or Springer firewall rather than freely available to everyone? I can think of only one good reason: many of those firewalled for-subcriber journals are prestigious. And as a graduate student or junior faculty member, you are in the position of needing to impress job search committees or tenure and promotion committees by publishing in prestigious journals. If you put an article in one of the better Springer journals, that will enhance your fortunes in academia more than just posting it on someone’s para-academic website journal would do.

But it occurred to me a year or so ago that there’s no point being a tenured full professor if I don’t allow myself the freedom that goes with that. Namely, it no longer matters too much whether I’m in a prestigious journal or on someone’s website. In fact, the website will draw more readers, and faster.

Last night, Alexander Markov pulled out his iPad and was showing me a number of Russian student theses that refer to speculative realism, including my own work. To my astonishment, more than half of the footnotes to me were to posts on this blog rather than to my books.

¶ 9:30 AM