electronica, continued

From
Date
I'd like to respond to Norm's comments on my recent posting. But before I 
do, I'd not like to be thought of as some kind of technophobe. I agree with 
Norm that computers are here to stay, that they offer enormous potential for 
publication. 

Norm writes that ' the vast
majority of the work that goes into making a journal ... is donated "free" 
and the costs associated with the rest (e.g.,
typesetting, figure formatting) can be greatly reduced in electronic
publishing'. 

Not true, because much of the production for print journals is ALREADY 
ELECTRONIC. Whatever the medium -- and whether or not the editors are 
actually paid -- most journals need to employ trained artists, computer 
operators and support staff to actually 'produce' a journal. The employment 
of these people implies an additional cadre of management to admister wages, 
pensions, terms and conditions, legal matters, subscription enquiries, 
marketing, advertising and so on. Even were NATURE to become fully 
electronic tomorrow, we'd still need many of these people to make it work. 
The debate about printing vs electronics boils down, simply, to the mundane 
aspects of printing and distribution.

 A 'free' journal is possible only if a few dedicated souls are willing to 
give up most or all of their time to run the journal, and/or their services 
are compensated by non-subscription revenue (such as fund-raisers, 
advertising, private income, their universities turning a blind eye, and so 
on) -- but eventually, someone, somewhere, will be signing a cheque.

However, I do agree with Norm that electronic publication should reduce 
costs, but journals will never be 'free'.

Norm writes  'I do disagree with the idea of high rejection rates simply for 
the sake of high rejection rates.'
I agree -- rejecting for the sake of it is silly. Editors are choosy because 
they need to think about the 'focus' of the magazine, and that they are 
(quite properly) serving the interests of readers and subscribers. More on 
this below.

Norm writes 'In fact, a number of the scientific professions' most prestigious
journals don't even send all submitted mss out for objective peer-review,
but instead rely on a small group of editors to decide what is and is not
appropriate for consideration... Electronic publication could free us of the 
economic
constraints that require certain journals to reject otherwise excellent
papers simply because they are too long, they have too many illustrations,
the journal already has too much of a backlog, or the ms doesn't conform to 
the intellectual "flavor of the month."'

I disagree. Quality control has nothing to do with the medium in which the 
journal appears. Neither has it anything to do with economics, at least not 
directly. Sure, if electronic publication saves money, the savings should be 
passed on to the subscribers (as Norm implies earlier). But these savings 
must not be used as licence to print more papers (Norm, you can't have it 
both ways). 

If Norm includes NATURE among his 'most prestigious journals', then, sure! 
the manuscripts we send out for review are selected by a small group of 
professional editors, who reject more than half the submissions before they 
ever see peer review. The job of these editors is to select those papers 
which appear to them to conform with the editorial aims of the journal (see 
http://www.nature.com for more on this). Papers that do not conform to these 
standards rightly belong elsewhere. 

People whose papers are rejected sometimes complain that we are fashion 
victims (Norm's term "flavour of the month" is a tired cliche used by 
Nature's detractors): but part of our stated aim is that the material we 
publish is cutting-edge (and, yes, we publish a lot of cutting-edge 
palaeontology). Were we to relax these rules SIMPLY because we went 
electronic, the journal would lose its focus, and ultimately its appeal to 
readers and subscribers -- and those who wish to submit papers.

HG
Henry Gee
henrygee@ess.ucla.edu