Page 64 - Winter2021

A CONVERSATION WITH JIM LYNCH
JHM: Last question: what are your personal views on the
EIC position?
JFL: I think you know me well enough, Jim, to know that for me work is play and vice versa and that I seri- ously enjoy both my science work and my editorial work. I wouldn’t have stuck with EIC work for close to 20 years if I didn’t get a good degree of satisfaction from it. Of course, it is very important work as well. We live in a supposedly “posttruth” world and so putting out results that people can trust via the peer-review process as well as well-considered opinions is an important thing to keep doing. So, rate my job satisfaction as “high.”
That being said, I’m hoping to stay on as EIC for only one more term and then pass the baton. I’m now a septuage- narian, and my family, telescopes, keyboards, electronics bench, and bookshelf are all beckoning me for more time. I’d hate to disappoint them. And as you know, I’ve had a few health issues, although I’m not about to do the “old guy” thing and expound on them.
helps here as well as being someone who has also pub- lished a few papers and knows how peer review works on a personal level. Serving on one or more of our publica- tions committees is also useful.
Being an ASA member would also be helpful in learning what technical directions the Society wants to head in as well as in suggesting directions.
And finally, I think that caring about what you do and deeming it an important part of your life is crucial. Having all the other attributes but not caring strongly about the work means that this is not the job for you. It is a simple truism that people do their best working at things they hold as important.
Acknowledgments
We thank ASA Publications Senior Managing Editor Liz Bury for her critical reading of this article and her valu- able comments and corrections.
References
Clarivate (2020). Journal citation reports data. In Indicators Handbook, v. 3.3. Available at https://acousticstoday.org/clarivate-citations-report. Accessed July 30, 2021.
For the next person who takes the job, I would like to pass on some insights.
An editor has to be more than just a scientist/technical person who understands the basics of the material that their journal is publishing. And in the case of ASA Pub- lications, that is hard enough to begin with, given the technical bandwidth of the Society. Indeed, interacting with the associate editors is the only way to do this. An EIC also has to have good people and management skills because the EIC’s desk is where all the problems land and just as many are personal as technical. A prime couple of those skills are patience and restraint because your per- sonal competence, intelligence, integrity, and perhaps even lineage will be called into question by an irate author not long after you take the job. Your job is to handle them dip- lomatically and, in many cases, even legalistically. Having a good wine cellar can be a real help with this.
Learning the publishing landscape is also part of the job because this is a big and complex business and is not taught in the usual science courses that our TC members take. On the job experience, usually as an associate editor,
About the Authors
James H. Miller miller@uri.edu
Department of Ocean Engineering University of Rhode Island (URI) Narragansett, Rhode Island 02882, USA
James H. (Jim) Miller is professor of
ocean engineering and oceanogra- phy at the University of Rhode Island (URI) in Narragansett, Rhode Island. He earned his BSEE from Worcester Polytechnic
Institute (WPI) Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1979; his MSEE from Stanford, Stanford, California, in 1981, and his ScD in oceanographic engineering from MIT, Cambridge, Massachu- setts, and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), Woods Hole, Massachusetts, in 1987. He teaches and conducts research in the areas of ocean acoustics, including the effects of the seafloor on propagation, marine bioacoustics, and the impacts of offshore wind farm construction. Jim is a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America and served as ASA president in 2013–2014. He is presently chair of the Acousti- cal Society Foundation Board.
64 Acoustics Today • Winter 2021