Page 32 - Summer 2015

Allan D. Pierce
Postal:
PO Box 339 East Sandwich, Massachusetts 02537 USA
Email:
allanpierce@verizon.net
Reading, Writing, and the Acoustical Society of America
The idea that all authors, or their sponsors, or their institutions, pay for all the costs of publication and of ensuring perpetual access seems extremely unreasonable.
Figure 1. Cover of the first issue of the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.
Introduction
I just finished a 15-year stint as the Edi- tor-in-Chief of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA). Partly because of the job and partly because of its role within the So- ciety's affairs, I have become acutely aware of some of the problems the scientific and technological communities are currently facing. The present era presents great op- portunities (but also new problems) be- cause of the great proliferation of scien- tific research (with a consequent decrease in average quality) throughout the world and because of the greater possibilities for inexpensive mass distribution (such as via the Internet) of the results of scientific re- search. The main problem, however, con- tinues to be that of connecting the people who actually do the research and who want to write about acoustics with those who potentially have an interest in the research
and/or those who might make use of that research. A secondary problem is that of inducing people who have something worth discussing to produce high-quality written manuscripts and submit them for publication. A third problem is that of inducing intelligent people to seriously read, appraise, and possibly criticize the published work in acoustics. The ASA has members who fall into one or more of the above-mentioned categories, and it also regards itself as being a conduit be- tween all persons, those living in the past, those currently alive, and those as yet unborn, who have an interest in the general topic of acoustics, with the definition of the term “acoustics” taken very broadly. The mission of the ASA, unchanged since its original formulation in 1929, is to “to increase and diffuse the knowledge of acoustics and to promote its practical applications.” One of the various means by which the Society sought to fulfill its mission was by the publication of a journal. The first issue (Figure 1) of its journal, the Journal of the Acoustical Society of Amer- ica (JASA), appeared in the same year that the Society was formed. The present article focuses on the achievement of the Society's mission by means of publishing.
One premise advanced here is that many of the problems that readers and writ- ers are encountering would be greatly reduced if they were more keenly aware of the services provided by professional societies. The world is certainly not ideal,
30 | Acoustics Today | Summer 2015, volume 11, issue 3 ©2015 Acoustical Society of America. All rights reserved.