Reflections on 30 years as an international journal editor

1. Inside Academic Publishing,
and How it is Changing
Reflections on 30 Years
as a Journal Editor
David Alexander
University College London

2. To begin with,
a little
personal history

3. Editor-in-Chief, Int. Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction
Formerly, Co-Editor, Disasters
Current editorial board memberships:-
• Planet@Risk
• Disaster Prevention and Management
• Environmental Management
• Geomorphology
• Journal of Geography and Natural Disasters
• Journal of Seismology and Earthquake Engineering
• Integrated Disaster Risk Management Journal
• ICPEM Alert
• Jàmbá: Journal of Disaster Risk Studies
• PLoS Currents - Disasters
• Journal of Natural Resources Policy Research
Past editorial board memberships:-
• Natural Hazards
• Natural Hazards and Earth System Science
Springer Series in Environmental Management (ex-Editor)

5. Editor-in-Chief
1985-2001

7. 54 Volumes, 4,215 Articles, 1977-2013

8. Flatiron Building (1905)
175 Fifth Avenue NYC
Our editorial office

9. Julius Springer
Berlin, 1842
Springer (+Kluwer,
+Wolters) is now
owned by EQT
Investments Inc.
and Government
of Singapore
Investment Corp.

10. Co-Editor,
2002-2015

11. Editor-in-Chief
2011-present

14. Special issues
Beijing
Production
Chennai
Oxford
Management
Ireland
IT and training
Amsterdam
Co-ordination

15. Rhodes W.
Fairbridge
1914-2006

16. Encyclopedias of Earth Sciences, 1950s-present:-
• Dowden, Hutchinson & Ross
• Hutchinson Ross
• Van Nostrand Reinhold
(Thompson, Wiley)
• Reinhold
• [D. Reidel Company]
• Chapman & Hall (Routledge, Taylor & Francis)
• Kluwer Academic Publishers
• Springer-Verlag
• Springer Science
Academic publishing as a
commodity and investment

17. UCL Press (1993)
Chapman & Hall
Taylor & Francis
Kluwer
Routledge
CRC Press
...possibly others
Currently
£67.13 new,
£1.66 used!

19. Now,
the trends

20. The big academic publishers:
• some international professional
and learned societies (e.g. ASCE)
• Cambridge University Press
• Oxford University Press
• Reed Elsevier
• Springer Science+Business Media
• Wiley-Blackwell
• Taylor & Francis
• Sage

21. Academic publishing has bulimia!

22. About 70 per cent of academic
publishing is for personnel reasons:
• getting a job
• keeping a job
• getting promoted
The field has become
intensely competitive.

23. The big problems with
academic papers, when
they are not good, are:-
• unoriginality
• repetitiveness
• mediocrity
• plagiarism.

25. 0
100
200
300
400
500
600
Papers published in Natural Hazards and NHESS
Natural Hazards Natural Hazard and Earth System Sciences
Papers published in Natural Hazards
and NHESS, 1988-2013
1990s:
Average 45
2013:
Total 815
plus 265
in press
― Natural Hazards
― Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences
1988 2013
450
An 18-fold increase
in 13 years
2014: 769

26. Paper or
digital?

27. • page budget
• size, price, frequency relationship
• cost of colour printing
• declining print subscriber base
• partly uncontrollable delays
in publication of articles.
Paper publication is limited by:-

28. • unlimited page budget
• standardised cost and access pay-walls
• rapid publication
(e.g. "open container" model)
• ability to link different media
• www.articleofthefuture.com.
Digital publication:-

29. "We believe the publisher adds relatively
little value to the publishing process...
We are simply observing that if the process
really were as complex, costly and value-
added as the publishers protest that it is,
40% margins wouldn't be available."
Academic publishing unmasked
Deutsche Bank, 2005

30. What Ranieri has done was simply to respond to Boschi's
appeal in Science. Science did not accept Ranieri's
eloquent response and asked him to shorten it, which he
did but [they] eventually rejected as if Science "do not
want to go into the issue anymore" ― which is incredible!
Lalliana Mualchin,
International Seismic Safety Organization

31. • open access is NOT free
- someone has to pay
• there are different
models of who does pay
• ability-to-pay discrimination
exists in all models
• commercial publishers
operate via commercial logic.
Open access versus the pay-wall

32. Bibliometry is fundamentally
meaningless, harmful and unnecessary
Bibliometry

33. The peer-
review process

34. Basic review judgement categories:-
A typical verdict: one 'accept', one
'reject' and one 'revise' or 'rewrite.'
Conclusion: academic judgements are
personal - there is no fundamental
objective truth about most articles.
• Accept
• Revise
• Rewrite
• Reject

35. Your editor's
perspective

36. Editor's pitfalls
• plagiarism, intellectual
property theft, dishonesty
• authors' and reviewer's egotism
• academics don't understand
how publishing works
• can't find reviewers
• reviewers decline to help, or
more likely fail to respond.

37. • quarterly, by volume, not issue
• started publishing in August 2012
• 13 volumes published, 14th in progress
• 54 articles published (9 per issue)
• 830 submissions, 330 in 2015
• 62% rejection rate
• ave. 2.86 invitations to get one review
• record: 34 invitations for two reviews.

38. Conclusions

39. • excessive number of journals
• excessive specialisation
and duplication of journals
• excessive publication rates
• personnel issues motivate many
(most?) journal paper submissions.
Crises in academic publishing
• excessive cost of journals...?

40. Future trends are unpredictable
because present trends are unsustainable.

41. Now let's discuss it!