Since 1986 I have published articles and chapters in various magazines, weeklies and books. This was initially mainly in Dutch and then in English and German. In addition, in the last decade I started to write more and more web articles. This is not only motivated by the desire to save trees. Especially in the Netherlands, many journals have simply ceased to exist. To the extent that they still appear, this is done in a much lower frequency. Throughout the Western world, people are reading less and less, and they are also doing so on paper to a decreasing extent.
At the same time, they are probably publishing in ever greater numbers. This is another reason why in the English-speaking academic world more and more journals are being published, journals that are also more and more specialized. Usually, these journals and articles possess little relevance for a general public interested in politics and society or for people who participate in societal decision-making. Research shows that the vast majority of the articles in these journals hardly find an audience, if at all. Consequently, they are not primarily written and published to contribute to the understanding and resolution of important social or scientific problems. Publishing has become an end in itself, with which those involved seek to strengthen their labor market position in academia.
In an effort to be more relevant, I have increasingly chosen to publish web articles as well as books. The web articles that appear for instance on the Social Science Works website can count on an audience of 200 to 4000 readers, which is a multitude of those published in academic journals. The audience reached by books is also much larger than that of journals, and also different in character.
For the English-language Web articles, click here.
For the German web-articles, click here.
For the Dutch web-articles, click here.