The last few decades have seen rapid changes in the online publishing of scholarly journals. Many readers of Utilitas may remember a time when there was no online version of the journal, and they would await the delivery of printed issues in the mail. Other readers may have never seen a printed issue, having always relied on online access provided by university libraries or, in rarer cases, individual online subscriptions.
Because of the shift to online access, subscriptions to the printed issues of Utilitas have fallen over the years. In fact, they currently stand at fewer than 30. As you might imagine, this number is not large enough to generate the economies of scale that are necessary for print publication to be financially sustainable. Accordingly, Cambridge University Press proposed to me that print publication of Utilitas end after the 2022 volume of the journal, and I agreed that was sensible.
In true utilitarian fashion, consideration was given to the harms as well as the benefits of this decision. Given the price of a print subscription, it seems likely that each print subscriber highly values the printed issues and will be disappointed by their discontinuation. But it is hard to argue (and perhaps no print subscriber would argue) that print subscriptions should operate at a loss for CUP, or that some price level can be found that would make print subscriptions break even for CUP.
As many of you know, on the CUP website for Utilitas, published articles are temporarily posted in an area called FirstView, and then grouped into issues corresponding to the printed issues. After 2022, although there will be no more printed issues for the online issues to correspond to, Utilitas articles will continue to be grouped into quarterly issues online as their final, permanent, venue of publication for being accessed and cited.
