From: Sandy Thatcher <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, 7 Mar 2013 11:26:14 -0600

I think there is a lot of variation, actually. While I was director at
Penn State, I followed a policy of aligning the journals program
editorially with the book program, so that there was some editorial
synergy between the two (with some journal contributors becoming book
authors and, in a few cases, journal editors doubling as book series
editors) as well as economies involved in marketing and promotion
(since we attended the scholarly conferences that were relevant to
both our books and journals in the same fields). But there are plenty
of presses where the book and journal programs have very little to do
with each other, and where journals acquisitions are entirely separate
from book acquisitions. Depending on the size of the journals program,
the press may or may not actually "have constant contact with the
community" through "attendance at key conferences." There is, for
sure, no ongoing design work involved; once a design for a journal has
been chosen, it is rarely, if ever, changed, and certainly not from
issue to issue. So there are important differences that are
financially as well as editorially significant. Press staff do not get
involved in the actual decisions about which articles to accept,
whereas they do control that part of the process for books.

Sandy Thatcher


At 5:21 PM -0500 3/6/13, LIBLICENSE wrote:
>
> From: Anthony Watkinson <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Wed, 6 Mar 2013 09:11:39 +0000
>
> Sandy will know that we have corresponded about journals before but I shall
> repeat what I have said to him for the benefit of the list. Publishers
> looking after journals do not stop work when the journal is started. Journal
> management involves journal development and this involves the publisher in
> constant contact with the community and interaction with the editorial
> group. Constant contact involves attendance at key conferences in order to
> understand how the field is evolving and of course meetings and telephone
> and e-mail interactions. Now that journals mostly have editorial online
> systems publishers can see what the editor is doing and should constantly
> monitor. The journal is an ongoing development process and an ongoing
> responsibility, financially as well as academically. It is like a book list
> but actually I would suggest more intensive. I suggest Sandy reads THE
> HANDBOOK OF JOURNAL PUBLISHING by Sally Morris and others. I bet he has
> already actually.
>
> Anthony
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Sandy Thatcher <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Mon, 4 Mar 2013 22:35:07 -0600
>
> I agree with Joe that time will tell how much pressures to keep Gold OA
> fees down affects editorial quality, of both the types that have been
> discussed here.  There is some evidence already, in such decisions as
> PeerJ's not providing editorial services as part of what the basic fee
> covers, that he has a point.
>
> But I think we need to understand that there are very clear differences
> among the types of editorial activities that various actors play in the
> system, and that they come into play differently in journal and book
> publishing.
>
> In journal publishing, the role of the journal editor has been most
> dominant. Joe has given a pretty good description of what a journal editor
> does in his second paragraph. The role of the publisher's staff is mostly
> subsidiary in journal publishing to that of the journal editor.  A journal
> has to be acquired by a publisher, and it has to be designed, but for
> journals, unlike books, these are activities performed once, at the outset
> and not repeated. Copyediting is ongoing, but in my experience copyediting
> for journals is more routine and less extensive than it is for book
> publishing and can follow a model style sheet established for the journal at
> the outset.
>
> In book publishing, by contrast, staff editors play a major role in the
> whole process. They determine what the profile of a list in the fields they
> cover is, actively solicit books that fit the profile, directly manage the
> peer-review process, work out a detailed publishing plan for each book, and
> engage in sometimes intensive editorial massaging of the book before and
> after acceptance. This last generally goes by the name of "developmental"
> editing and focuses on large-scale features of a book, leaving the detailed
> line-by-line editing to the copyeditor.  It can't be emphasized enough how
> much wider and deeper this work by an acquiring editor is than is typical
> for journal editors.  In an essay I wrote about acquisitions in 1999, I
> identified nine different functions that such editors perform, which I
> called "hunter, selector, shaper, linker, stimulator, promoter, ally,
> reticulator, and listbuilder":
>
> http://www.psupress.org/news/pdf/THEVAL~1.PDF.
>
> The closest analogue to the
> journal editor in the world of book publishing is the book series editor.
> For university presses, another key component of the system is the faculty
> editorial board.  For book publishing, each book is a separate entity that
> requires its own special copyediting and design (though some publishers have
> attempted to achieve economies by funneling books into a finite set of
> "model books" that define the parameters for both design and copyediting).
>
> How Gold OA will affect book publishing is even less certain at this point
> than it is for journal publishing. Palgrave Macmillan just recently
> announced a Gold OA option for its monograph publishing program, which
> received some comment on this list, and Amherst College is about to launch
> an OA-only press based, it appears, on an endowment model.  The latter,
> presumably, would be less subject to the kind of pressures affecting quality
> that Joe worries about than the PM approach, but we'll have to wait and see.
>
> Sandy Thatcher