I made a remarkable discovery this past week. An article I'd written on the Fast and Furious film franchise, and its engagements with Japan, recently published in one of my department's own journals, had been downloaded over 4,000 times. Here's a link to the article.
It's an intriguing development in an interesting story. Most Japanese universities like to publish their own journals as publishing channels for their own staff. My English department publishes no less than three, all with content reviewed and edited within the department. We're thus asked to review each other's essays, and though this process is "blind" in theory, it virtually never is in practice. The journals cover a very wide range of things: articles on English literature, the historical background to literature, Japanese literature in its relations to English literature, theatre, English linguistics, Japanese linguistics, sociolinguistics and all sorts of EFL content. In fact, the scope of the journals is basically meant to be coextensive with the very diverse research interests of members of the department.
Until now, at least. No one had written about popular movies before, and even though the focus was very much on the representation of Japan in the Fast and Furious series, there was clear concern, mostly emanating from one reader, that this was somehow ineligible for inclusion in a journal that I myself had often served in the role of editor. I was told that what I had written couldn't be accepted as an "article," but could be accepted as a "research note." The problem here is that we don't publish any technical criteria to distinguish an article/essay from a "research note," though when I protested, some ad hoc criteria were tendentiously thrown together to supposedly eliminate my piece from the category of articles, while at the same time justifying all the other contributions (and hundreds more, in earlier issues) being treated as articles, and by extension more heavyweight contributions to scholarship. The distinction wouldn't stand up in court for five minutes: if this essay of mine is not an article, then dozens of other articles in our journals are not articles either.
The whole episode left a bad taste in my mouth, but I do think the purpose of writing anything is to have people read it, and if this article on the Fast and Furious is something people want to read, that's fantastic.