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On Publishing Online
Joel Kanter
Since the launch of Beyond the Couch in March 2007, we have had nearly 6000 unique "visitors" to the journal. Feedback has been positive and we encourage all to forward information about this current issue to your colleagues.
Reading an online journal is a somewhat different process than reading a print journal. I personally find it difficult to read anything of length on a computer screen and I often print out longer articles that I find interesting and read them at my leisure. With this in mind, we have formatted Beyond the Couch so you can easily print this directly from the webpage. The colored borders should disappear and the printout should be relatively uncluttered. Or you can easily highlight ("mark") the text you wish to copy and paste it into a blank word processing document.
However, when you do this, you will be losing one of the unique features of cyberpublishing: the utility of "hotlinks" (the blue text) that takes you to additional information and resources. For example, we have "hotlinked" most book titles to amazon.com where you can find purchasing information on any of the cited volumes. And, for some texts, we have linked names and institutions to resources that expand on the text. For example, with the Bowlby interview, we have many links from the names of colleagues he mentioned to Wikipedia entries which offer additional biographical context.
In developing these links, I discovered other resources I was unaware of. I had never heard of Eric Trist, Bowlby's colleague at Tavistock, and was delighted to discover the online archive of Tavistock papers at his website. In this website, I discovered a copy of the Bowlby's 1949 article "The study and reduction of group tensions within the family" which Christopher Reeves discusses in his paper in this issue. As Reeves discusses, this is one of Bowlby's rare clinical papers. In this paper, we can observe Bowlby discovering an approach to family intervention that would seem commonplace today. Yet without online access through these links, obtaining a copy of this 1949 paper would otherwise require a trip to a well-provisioned university library.
So if an article in Beyond the Couch captures your interest, I would encourage you to scan it briefly for the blue hyperlinks if you are inclined to read a printed version. These links may enhance your appreciation of the original paper and may lead you in new directions.
Contributing to Beyond the Couch
I'd encourage readers to consider contributing to Beyond the Couch in a variety of ways. We can certainly use submissions of new material that captures captures the interplay between psychoanalysis and social work without excessive jargon or theoretical complexity. Several of the papers in our first two issues emerged from papers prepared for oral presentation; though scholarly, they did not fulfill the conventional parameters expected from print journals.
Experience-near writing and the use of the first person are welcomed as well, though the line between personal reflection and exhibitionistic self-revelation is sometimes difficult to navigate. Such writing need not encompass an extended case report. This could
involve sharing an experience of a single session or phone call, or one's experience of a book or film. And authors need not be "experts" with decades of experience; submissions from early career social workers are most welcome.
Writers may also consider the pros and cons of publishing their work in an online journal. Obviously, issues of prestige are involved here and, for authors in academia, there can be very real issues concerning tenure and career advancement. The main advantage, as I see it, of publishing in Beyond the Couch, an open-access online journal, is that articles have unlimited possibilities for finding readers at all points in their career and around the world. Subscriptions, access to university libraries or costly online services are not needed useful content. Readers can easily forward links to an informative paper to literally hundreds of colleagues, via email, listserves and blogs, with a handful of keystrokes.
Finally, we still need more editorial assistance. We could use someone to help with art, someone to help with book and film reviews, interviewers, editorial reviewers, and so on. If interested, please email me privately at joel.kanter@gmail.com.
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