Juanita
Juanita was on her first year under a tenure track contract at a large state university. She decided to send one chapter of her dissertation to a well-known electronic literary magazine published by a most prestigious university in a European country. The online journal had more than 10 years experience in its field, namely, Hispanic literature.
Juanita chose this journal due to the increasingly relevant role that the web has in making articles available to the scholarly community. She was looking forward to receiving feedback from experts all around the world. And she got it. When Juanita submitted this article as part of her first year achievement, the chair of the department dismissed the publication because it was an online source. The chair did not ask whether the publication was refereed or not. Juanita described in her report how prestigious the university that hosted the webpage was. She also stated clearly the relevance of publishing online in order to make the work
available to researchers abroad irrespective of whether their respective libraries had a subscription to the journal or not. Furthermore, it is worth mentioning that for Juanita, working on Hispanic literature, it is relevant to receive feedback from Hispanic researchers all over the world. It is just a fact that such researchers do not always have access to US sources. Unfortunately, the chair chose to neglect this factor. The chair did not pay attention to these aspects and he/she did not carry out any research to verify Juanita's statement. The chair refused to accept the publication. Since then, Juanita has restricted herself to publish only in American imprint journals, not exactly the wisest decision given that we live in a global world and that we are working in the field of foreign languages.
