First, allow me to thank you for your past generous support of the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America. I am now asking you to support us in a different way.

In the wake of the COVD pandemic inflation has become part of our daily lives, affecting our budgets and reshaping our priorities. PIASA has also been confronted with this new reality of rising costs, no more so than in the costs of producing our multidisciplinary Polish Studies journal, The Polish Review, the only one of its kind in North America. A part of these costs can be attributed to the permanent expansion of the journal from 128 to 144 pages, as we attempt to keep pace with an unprecedented number of new submissions of the highest quality that arrive almost every week from established and emerging scholars based in many different countries.

 

A greater contributor, however, is in the rapidly rising costs faced by academic journal publishing more generally. In other words, The Polish Review is hardly alone in this regard.

 

Other journals have tried to meet these challenges in various ways, among them by substantially raising membership rates to pass on the costs to journal subscribers, and by making online subscriptions the default option or even the only option to save on mailing costs. PIASA, for its part, views such measures as a last resort in providing The Polish Review to its members.

 

What we propose instead is to maintain print copies as the default option for member subscribers while appealing to those members who would be willing, or may even prefer, to receive The Polish Review online. One major advantage of an online subscription is that you will be able to read the kind of excellent articles, review essays, and book reviews which have come to define The Polish Review approximately one month earlier than when they would become accessible in hard copy.

To be clear, receipt of The Polish Review electronically will be entirely voluntary. We would not move subscribers from the hard copy print option to the online option without their expressed agreement. We understand that some readers simply prefer to have the journal physically in their hands instead of on a computer screen. However, if you are willing and ready to make the switch, and to help PIASA contain costs and reduce our environment footprint in the process, we ask you to send an email to or send a written note addressed to The Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America, 208 East 30th Street, New York NY 10016.

― Robert Blobaum, PIASA President