Re: growth of the discipline

[Norm MacLeod <nm@xxxxxxxxx>]

Perhaps the saturation effect that John is seeing in his data has more to do
with the economics of publishing a journal these days then with the actual
amount of paleontological output.  I know that many editors are putting
pressure on authors (and reviewers) to decrease the size of manuscripts
primarily because their budgets only allow them to publish a fixed number of
pages and the cost of publishing are going up faster than the income of
most scientific societies.  Of course the fact that most membership lists
for societies have fallen during the last decade hasn't helped matters.
Nevertheless, the raw number of publications responds to many factors
other than the raw number of available manuscripts.  If publication
budgets are a problem perhaps (at least part of) the answer is for the
societies to engage in (or sponsor) some type of on-line publication
series.  On-line journals have existed for years in other scientific 
disciplines.  Why not paleontology?  The standard excuse in this area has to
do with the difficulties in providing adequate graphics but I submit that
those problems have largely been solved.

Norm MacLeod