The idea of an online learned and peer-refereed journal for comparative literature and culture emerged from the observation that with the rapid development of technology and new media and new media scholarship the humanities must follow suit. The use of new technology -- in this case the internet and the world wide web -- is advantageous and must be exploited in all of its aspects for the advancement of scholarship in the humanities. The internet and the world wide web clearly serve the dissemination and transfer of knowledge to the benefit of scholarship, the individual scholar, as well as the general public. At the University of Alberta's Research Institute for Comparative Literature (RICL; in 1999 renamed to the Milan V. Dimic Research Institute for Comparative Literature), a home page was built in 1995 by the associate director of the Institute, Steven Tötösy, for information and research in comparative literature, including material such as an international directory of comparatists, various bibliographies, links, and an information page about the University of Alberta Department of Comparative Literature. The RICL web site (<http://www.ualberta.ca/ARTS/ricl.html>) has been discontinued as of September 1998 and its material -- the international directory of comparatists and various bibliographies -- have been carried over into the Library of CLCWeb at <http://www.arts.ualberta.ca/clcwebjournal/library.html>. The RICL web page of information about the
Department of Comparative Literature of 1995-98 preceded the official webpage of the University of Alberta's Depertment of Comparative Literature, Religion, and Film/Media Studies as the Department launched its own official web page -- using most material about the Department previously available in the RICL web site only -- in February 1999 at <http://www.humanities.ualberta.ca/comparative_studies/>.

RICL associate director Steven Tötösy was also associate editor and desktop publisher of the Canadian Review of Comparative Literature / Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée (CRCL/RCLC) from 1989 to 1997 as well as the in-house editor and publisher of RICL's publishing program 1989-97 (for its list of books published, see <http://clcwebjournal.lib.purdue.edu/books.html>) and it happened upon the reassignment of the editorship of the CRCL/RCLC with 1 July 1997 that the idea of an online journal for the discipline emerged. An extensive search on the world wide web resulted in the observation that -- surprizingly enough -- there exists in the public domain no online journal in and for the discipline of comparative literature and culture, although some comparative literature and comparative literature oriented journals place the table of contents of their publications on the world wide web (for a list of such journals, see <http://clcwebjournal.lib.purdue.edu/journals.html>) and there are several active online journals and web sites in cultural studies, including such in the public domain. After consultation with colleagues in a number of countries across the globe, it became obvious that the launching of an online journal would make sense and that an online journal would fill a gap on the landscape of  scholarship in the humanities in literature and culture. In consequence, an advisory board and associate editors group was struck, application for an ISSN number was processed with and obtained from (1481-4374) the National Library of Canada, the listing, archiving, and mirroring <http://collection.nlc-bnc.ca/100/201/300/clcweb/index.html>, of the new online journal with the National Library of Canada has been arranged, etc., and the first issue of the new learned quarterly was placed online in March 1999. The
University of Alberta Faculty of Arts server provided the URL and the necessary disk space for the web location of the journal, the university's Help Desk and the University of Alberta Faculty of Arts Technologies for Learning Centre (TLC) at <http://www.humanities.ualberta.ca/TLC> provided occasional technical help for the journal and its functions such as the CLCWeb moderated listserv.

The intellectual direction of the journal is holistic and pluralistic: While work in and with contextual approaches is favoured and actively sought after, no submission is rejected a priori as long as the editor, the members of the advisory board / associate editors, and outside assessors determine, in blind peer review, the intellectual and scholarly value of a submission for publication (for the aims and objectives of the journal go to <http://clcwebjournal.lib.purdue.edu/aims.html>; for procedures of publication go to <http://clcwebjournal.lib.purdue.edu/proced1.html>; for procedures of submission go to <htttp://clcwebjournal.lib.purdue.edu/proced2.html> .

The journal's structure of the advisory board / associate editors is non-traditional. Instead of the traditional two-tier structure where members of the advisory board include renown figures, "stars," in the field, that is, such members give renommee to the particular journal via the value of name recognition but are otherwise, in the rule, not involved with the journal, CLCWeb's structure of advisory board / associate editors is meant to work as a group -- a combination of renown and senior scholars as well as junior scholars -- whose members are involved in the assessment of work submitted for publication, in the solicitation of new work for publication, in the promotion of the journal, and generally in providing ongoing commentaries re the journal and all its functions. The journal's success is thus a priori and principally determined by the quality of material published in it.

The set-up and start-up of CLCWeb including all technical aspects such as the design of its index page occurred without any funding. Attempts have been made to obtain funding from the SSHRC: Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (new technology and learned journals program). Unfortunately, the program administrators insisted that CLCWeb, similar to the requirements for traditional hard-copy journals, must have 200 paid subscribers and the argument that the journal is online and in the mode of free access did not carry any weight. And the argument of the high web traffic of the journal already with only two issues online or the argument to accept the "hits" on and "session use" of the journal's material in lieu of paid subscriptions as a demonstration of its use in the scholarly community did not persuade the SSHRC to consider funding. Similarly, the University of Alberta Department of Comparative Literature considered the journal a personal effort of the editor and remained uninterested in any type of financial support or support "in kind" such as graduate student assistantships although it sustained moral support for the journal. As far as the Department is concerned, the situation re the journal was deemed appropriate because the Department felt that it is unable to support two journals at the same time, namely the CRCL/RCLC and CLCWeb.

By January 2000 following considerations of and plans for the development of CLCWeb and its legitimization in the world of scholarship, the editor in cooperation with the journal's advisory board / associate editors began exploring possibilities to relocate the journal from the Faculty of Arts at the Uiversity of Alberta to a university press. After several months of contacts, e-mail exchanges, and discussions with up to a dozen university presses and virtual libraries across North America and Europe, the editorial board of Purdue University Press <http://www.thepress.purdue.edu> approved the relocation to Purdue and the publishing of CLCWeb by Purdue. Purdue's decision is remarkable and far-sighted for several reasons. All other presses and even those who expressed avid interest to host and publish the journal ceased to be interested upon the editor's insistence that the journal would have to remain in the public domain, that is, in the free-access mode. All presses expressed the conviction that the journal would have to be published if relocated in the paid-subscription mode. Purdue, on the other hand, accepted the editor's argument that CLCWeb must remain in the free-access mode because of the principles of social responsibility, the notion of the internet and the web as a democratic venue for the globalization of knowledge, scholarly communication, and knowledge transfer. Of course, the question of where the money would come from if all online journals are in the mode of free access is valid. However, the argument for the mode of free-access of online journals in the humanities and social sciences -- despite the fact that such scholarly journals online are in the absolute minority to date -- includes the proposition that income for the press by offering CLCWeb in the free-access mode is generated by name recognition for the press based on the high web traffic of CLCWeb. In other words, income is generated by and from advertisement. It is in this that Purdue is far-sighted when compared with the vast majority of university presses in the humanities.

With issue 2.3 (September 2000), CLCWeb is published by Purdue University Press. The journal and all its functions incl. its Library (e.g., the international directory of comparatists, bibliographies, etc.) and its moderated listserv for news and announcements in comparative literature and culture are supported and assisted in the technical domain by Purdue University Libraries and Purdue University Press.

After leaving the University of Alberta with 30 June 2000 and now residing in Winchester at Boston, the founding editor of CLCWeb, Steven Tötösy, remains the editor of the journal. Upon the relocation of the journal, an enlargement of the journal's advisory board / associate editors by new members was thought to be appropriate and six new members accepted to serve on the board of the journal: Thomas Bacher (Purdue University Press), Emily Mobley (Purdue University), Sneja Gunew (University of British Columbia), Bart Keunen (University of Ghent), Anthony Julian Tamburri (Florida Atlantic University), and William Thornton (National Cheng Kung University). The initial members of the advisory board / associate editors were Herbert Arlt (Vienna), Remo Ceserani (University of Bologna), F. Elisabeth Dahab (Calfornia State University at Long Beach), Roumiana Detcheva (Montréal), Babis Dermitzakis (University of Athens), Elizabeth A. Flynn (Michigan Technological University), Patricia D. Fox (Indiana University at Bloomington), Armando Gnisci (University of Rome), Montserrat Iglesias Santos (University Carlos III de Madrid), Marko Juvan (University of Ljubljana), John T. Kirby (Purdue University), Jose Manuel Losada Goya (University Complutense Madrid), Aldo Nemesio (University of Torino), Peter Petro (University of British Columbia), Elka Tschernokoshewa (Institute of Sorbian Studies), Reinhold Viehoff (University of Halle-Wittenberg), Wang Ning (Beijing Language and Culture University), Pablo Zambrano (University of Huelva), and Vera Zubarev (University of Pannsylvania).

As a peer-reviewed forum of scholarship and in a form that combines traditional scholarship and practices and new media scholarship and technology, the journal offers the possibility of training and involvement in the study of the humanities in general and in comparative literature and culture in the particular. Owing to the nature of new media scholarship and publishing, editorial assistants can be located physically no matter where. For the above reasons as well as for the reason of assistance needed in the work of the journal, CLCWeb appoints graduate student editorial assistants for periods of one academic year (renewable). The tasks of the graduate student assistants include editing, file transfers and formatting, HTML, bibliography work, the maintenance of the journal's Library incl. the checking of active/non-active web links, technical, administrative, and market dimensions and aspects of new media scholarship and publishing, etc. Upon an advertisement posted on the listserv of CLCWeb in May 2000, in the ensuing two months thirty positive responses from seven countries arrived from whom the editor selected Steven Aoun (Monash University) and Wendy C. Nielsen (University of California Davis) for the academic year 2000-01 as editorial assistants for CLCWeb (see the editorial page of the journal at <http://clcwebjournal.lib.purdue.edu/editor.html>. The appointment of further graduate student editorial assistants is under ongoing consideration.

The journal's online history, monthly, and quarterly statistics can be accessed at <http://clcwebjournal.lib.purdue.edu/stats/index.html> (the statistics include those from the journal's time at the University of Alberta).