other existing e-journal

From
Date
There is an interesting paper on "computers and geoscience communication"
by W. Brian Whalley in the latest issue of Terra Nova. You don't need the
paper copy. The URL is http://www.gly.bris.ac.uk/WWW/Terra
Nova/whalley.html

In this paper there is a mention of the electronic journal "Glacial Geology
and Geomorphology" (http://ggg.qub.ac.uk/ggg). I have just tried it. They
announce to become fully active in March. It is a commercial journal issued
by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. The papers will be peer reviewed indeed.

A comment related to the review of papers. Definitely this is necessary
and, as an author, I benefitted a lot from comments by my colleagues.
However, the paper we (the International Inoceramid Workshop) wrote about
Cretaceous inoceramids to standardise our taxonomic, morphometric, and
stratigraphic work is waiting for publication since three years. The
reason: the society journal ran out of money. This paper has been written
by THE specialists in the field and it was reviewed by independent
reviewers in addition. However, the process of getting the paper printed is
not determined by the quality of the paper or the reviews. We met during a
conference and submitted the ms to be published in the proceedings of this
meeting (as part of a society journal). For the calculated price of this
volume I could easily buy several gigabytes of hardisk space and hire help
enough to set up procedures to publish the volume electronically. After
this is done once, this particular journal would load the society budget at
about 1/10 of its present price (for personnell) when future issues are
also published electronically.
Aren't there simple economic reasons to go electronic, to unload our
paleontological societies financially ? Printing on paper does not
guarantee quality (thank you Jere, for your report on workload with
reviews). Electronic publishing is the alternative for all these important
society journals, and even students who need to publish their thesises
(this is required by rules at many universities at least in Germany, and it
costs (the students) ...). Maybe there is not even a need for publishing
normal papers electronically. But how many important monographs are NOT
written today because there is no space and money to publish them. I know a
lot and I wish I could have access to this potential information. Why not
creataing a "Paleonet Monograph Series" to make a start?

Heinz Hilbrecht




Address:

Heinz Hilbrecht
Geological Institute
ETH Zentrum
Sonneggstr. 5
CH-8092 Zuerich
Switzerland

phone:  ++41-1-6323676
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WWW: http://eurasia.ethz.ch/~heinz/
e-mail:  Hilbrecht@erdw.ethz.ch