Page 63 - Winter2021

on it. This keeps us in touch with both the younger and older demographic.
JHM: Is ASA Publications staffed at the right level? Could you comment?
JFL: ASA Publications has a rather small (and excel- lent) permanent staff, enough to cover the day-to-day operations that are needed. When some additional help is needed, we contract out some tasks but really not very often. As to our Editorial Board, we have a very large pool of associate editors for JASA, JASA-EL, and POMA, who are volunteers. Given our Society’s (and thus our publications) broad bandwidth of topics, we find that this a good way to ensure that all the technical areas are well covered and that we don’t overburden a few individuals. We ask our associate editors to handle roughly a dozen papers per year, which we feel is not overtaxing them given that they are generally working full time to begin with. This model has worked well for the ASA for years and seems to be continuing to work well.
I might mention that our permanent staff is working almost fully remotely. Due to circumstances beyond our control, we gave up a permanent office site about three years ago and found that we could function just as well, if not better, without one. Modern phone and computer conference capabilities make “work at home” an effective option and also a cost-effective one. We have moved all our books and archival journal material to small storage units, and even that material will be culled to a very small amount. The “go to the office every day” paradigm has drastically changed!
TFD: You mentioned that, in addition to quality and timeliness, the journals would also be stressing “promo- tion and advertising.” Could you elaborate?
JFL: As an author, you put in work to produce a high- quality paper and then revise it based on feedback from peer review (which we hopefully have made useful and timely for you.) Now, you want it to be read by people and used! But, given the amount of competi- tor journals that exist today, we can’t just sit back and expect people to come to us based on our journal(s) being “well respected.” That gets you some traffic, yes, but it is no longer sufficient. We have to go to people and let them know that we have material that will be of
interest to them. Other journals are definitely doing it, and I don’t want to see the ASA journals and articles left behind and ignored!
We now have a reasonably large program of marketing and advertising coordinated with AIP Publishing and are also developing some tactics on our own, especially in regard to utilizing social media. Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are channels that we currently use and closely monitor. We also have a podcast called Across Acoustics (see acrossacoustics.buzzsprout.com) where we interview authors about their articles. And we are considering also using games, quizzes, contests, hand- outs, and any other legitimate means we can think of. And there is a new ad hoc ASA committee called the Publications Engagement Advisory Board that will be working on new ideas to attract authors, readers, and any other “shareholders” of our publications content. We don’t intend to become “P. T. Barnums,” but we don’t want to be stodgy, either!
JHM: How does publications involve early-career people and students?
JFL: Let me answer “how much?” first. The simple answer is not enough. This is an area that needs some further work, and I’d like to talk to the Student Council in the not-too-distant future about possible ideas.
As to what we’ve done, we started the Publications Engagement Advisory Board that has a few of students and early-career members, and we look forward to their and the other members’ ideas to enhance our engage- ment and social media efforts.
Also, we held a workshop a few years ago, which Tessa Bent, John Hansen, our publications staff, and I produced. It was entitled something like “So you want to be an author/reviewer/editor, eh?,” and it gave the students and early-career people some contrived papers, reviews, and editorial responses to consider and judge. These items were purposely made to contain mistakes in content and judgment, some pretty outrageous. It was fun produc- ing these spoof documents and even more fun leading groups of workshop participants in dissecting them and how they would respond to them. I’d very much like to do this again because I think it was a good introduction as to how you “play” things in these roles.
Winter 2021 • Acoustics Today 63