The Ethos of Online Publishing

This chapter argues that online academic journals are not only a legitimate venue and sustainable source of disciplinary inquiry, but an important professional development opportunity for graduate students as future faculty and are therefore crucial to maintaining a discipline's ethos. The authors begin by reviewing the ethos of individually produced print publications in the humanities, paying particular attention to the value such publications hold in helping scholars earn tenure and promotion. The authors then posit that efforts within the rhetoric and writing scholarly community to recognize the collaborative nature of multimodal digital texts and to advocate for the collaborative production of such digital texts, which has helped such scholarship achieve a higher level of ethos over the past two decades. Emphasizing the role of graduate students in these ongoing efforts, the authors conclude by recommending three benchmarks developing and advanced scholars should implement to increase their own professional development and thus the ethos of online academic publishing: curricular development, team development, and dissertation research.