The 8th Anniversary Editorial.(Editorial)(Editorial)

This Summer 2005 issue is the thirty-second issue of Academic Exchange Quarterly, a journal begun eight years ago at Chattanooga State College in Tennessee. It is now published in New York and has grown significantly. I first joined the editorial staff of AEQ in 1999, two years after its initial publication, and I am proud to be associated with it six years later. I have the Spring 1999 issue before me now, and it was a slender production containing some twenty brief articles within a space of eighty-six pages. The first issue in the Fall of 1997 was even shorter with most of the articles written by individuals from Chattanooga State.

Now the issues of AEQ contain approximately sixty articles within over three hundred pages. Whereas the initial issues contained articles written by authors from only a few institutions, as of last count, there have been authors from 573 colleges and universities around the world. Those figures show a 200% increase in journal content and 248% increase in page numbers.

The readership base has increased significantly also. When AEQ first began, the readership numbered no more than a few hundred. Now there are over 24,000 readers, a figure based on library and individual subscriptions. In fact, this figure increases even more when one takes into account the online versions available on Gale Expanded Academic ASAP, Expanded Academic ASAP International, and Infotrac OneFile. Most of AEQ's readers are teachers in colleges and universities. Many college libraries are paid subscribers, and even the prestigious British Library has a paid sub- scription.

What accounts for this phenomenal growth? It is because of the ingenious combination of Internet and print publication. Aspiring authors submit their articles via MS Word to AEQ's New York office, whereupon the office staff puts the submissions onto an anonymous "track your submission" web page. The members of the journal's editorial staff, consisting of approximately forty academicians from the U.S., Australia, Canada, Israel, Spain, Taiwan, United Kingdom, engage in a double-blind review of the articles. Authors may literally track the ...