Page 12 - Summer 2015

James F. Lynch
Postal:
Bigelow 203, MS #11 Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Woods Hole, Massachusetts 02543 USA
Email:
jlynch@whoi.edu
Update on Acoustical Society of America Publications
from the Editor in Chief
JASA may be a world renowned journal, but there are many other good journals extant in the world. How can we improve and modernize JASA to be competitive in an aggressive and changing publishing environment?
By way of introduction, I am Jim Lynch, a Senior Scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution three days a week and now the new Editor in Chief (EIC) of the publications of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA) the other two days a week. I am succeeding Allan Pierce as EIC but not replacing him. Each editor brings a unique personality and skill set to the job, and mine and Allan’s have some differences. But we also have some strong similarities in our love and respect for science and technology and for the ASA and its publications. The ASA has provided us with a technically excellent and collegial home over the years, and the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (JASA), JASA-Express Letters (JASA- EL), Acoustics Today (AT), and Proceedings on Meetings in Acoustics (POMA) have provided us with excellent venues in which to publish our work. The EIC’s efforts as “good steward” of the ASA publications are in some sense a way of paying ASA back for what it has provided us. But let me end this small personal note here. I want to talk about the ASA publications, with some emphasis on JASA, rather than about the recent EICs.
Let me start by saying that, overall, our publications are in reasonably good shape. Thanks to our editors, associate editors, staff, and reviewers, our publications are of high quality and either have kept a steady volume of articles published or have increased. Our journal finances have been stable despite general worries about changes in the overall business model for journals. So let me give us all a brief pat on the back for that – we should be proud of our success to date.
But resting on one’s laurels and complacency are a guaranteed recipe for even- tual failure. There are many good journals extant that are competing for acoustics papers and, moreover, the publishing world is changing rapidly. We need to stay competitive and up-to-date. I think a healthy way to look at the situation (in a col- loquial vein) is, “Hey, we’re good, but we can be, and need to be, better to survive and flourish.” With that statement, let me turn to just what needs improvement and how we can accomplish useful changes going forward. I note that these are my viewpoints presented here but that ASA publications are a society (and world) re- source and they need everybody’s ideas and input. If you have such input, I would be very glad to get it at jasaeditor@acousticalsociety.org.
Let me start off with the spectrum of four publications that ASA currently offers: JASA, JASA-EL, AT, and POMA. Each offers something different to the authors and readers. JASA provides a standard peer-reviewed journal; JASA-EL provides a home for short, rapidly published results; AT provides a “general audience” inter- face for acoustics to both the ASA and the outside world; and POMA provides a home for meetings papers and archives many useful results that would likely not
10 | Acoustics Today | Summer 2015, volume 11, issue 3 ©2015 Acoustical Society of America. All rights reserved.