For 15 years Sino-Japanese Studies was published on paper and distributed around the world. But in 2003, this unique journal appeared for the last time – until last month, when founding editor Joshua Fogel gave it a second chance online.
Why? The Internet makes publishing cheaper and more environmentally friendly and there is still a great deal of interest in the field, says Fogel, Canada Research Chair in the History of Modern China.
When Fogel, a world-renowned specialist in Chinese-Japanese cross-cultural connections, and a group of Asian scholars launched Sino-Japanese Studies in 1988, they conceived it as a journal devoted to studies of China and Japan together from all disciplines and time periods. The revived online, open-view journal remains true to this original vision and will continue to feature original, refereed articles, translations, reviews and news from the field.
The first online article in Volume 16 (2009) appeared in January – Fogel’s translation of “Demon Capital Shanghai: The ‘Modern’ Experience of Japanese Intellectuals” by Liu Jianhui.
The Web site, designed and maintained by Harvard University PhD candidate Konrad Lawson, features content from the most recent issue, an archive of past issues, the editor’s biography, news and a submission .jpg)
form.
“Online publishing allows us to keep the same high academic standards while reducing the carbon footprint, saving trees and making the journal even less expensive than its earlier hard format,” says Fogel.
Left: Joshua Fogel
He has decided to take on the editorship again, convinced of enduring scholarly interest in a field that no other journals in China, Japan and Hong Kong cover in quite the same way.
Fogel launched the original journal when he was a professor at Harvard University and continued editing and publishing it while he was a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he taught from 1989 to 2005.