Page History

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• Initiatives suggested through the flurry of emails (feel free to add/edit the list):
  • Overall:
    • work w/ AGU and SPA leadership to institutionalize SWJ/SWQ as a flagship science policy publication for AGU
    • increase visibility of journal and quarterly beyond its current readership
  • Access/Citation Rate:
    • increase the number of reviews among the journal papers
    • continue/expand the Editor's Choice column
    • work with other editors to encourage redirection of appropriate research papers to SWJ
    • work with other editors for greater cross-referencing of relevant papers via new WWW site capabilities
  • Address Editorial Management Burdens / Production Costs
    • pursue "sponsored" support for professional editing and hardcopy printing costs for Quarterly
    • examine whether the production methods for the quarterly can economically leverage the Wiley "special collections" features to enable iPad/ebook versions and print-on-demand
    • establish subscription rules for print versus electronic versions of the Quarterly and processes for continued maintenance of the distribution list
    • carefully assess the government-mandated open access journal model, the responses to that mandate across the relevant publishers, and the potential benefit/liability to a range of journal and quarterly business cases.
      

• *Value to Community identified in emails/telecon notes:

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  value value

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  • important policy magazine for the Union and for a broad segment of membership
  • premier journal for space weather
  • the journal is the only society sponsored publication for operational space weather research
  • quarterly is key for communicating ideas to people with limited science background

• *Primary Challenges identified in emails/telecon notes:

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  challenges1 challenges1

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  • access statistics appear low; one of least accessed AGU journals
  • cost, including the quarterly, is high relative to other journals

• *Contributing Challenges identified in emails/telecon notes:

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  challenges2 challenges2

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  • scientists in the field perhaps either do not have the time to publish the applications of their research or it's not a priority?
  • the quarterly somewhat over-shadows the journal? a casual poll reveals that some scientists aren't aware there are two distinct, but linked publications
  • increasing the visibility of the journal can result in increased subscriptions to the Quarterly, which increases costs.
  • authors of non-technical articles may not continue to write for the journal/quarterly if their writings will no longer reach the decision makers and policy folks that the quarterly has reached in the past.

• *AGU/Wiley assets about to be in place that can be leveraged:

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  assets assets

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  • iPad App soon available for SWJ.  Once synced with institutional account, downloads and reading can happen anywhere for 3 months. The app provides an HTML view of the content and can be organized by special section.  One can browse by issue or by just released articles. Note that the quarterly is currently produced in a manner which limits the ability to participate in this rollout of journal aps.
  • Wiley is working on redesign for journal WWW sites including flexible "widgets" that can be used to increase cross-referencing between journals and/or special collections.  One new feature will be a "special collections" feature than can pull and organize content across journals and include options for a cover, TOC, and introduction.  These can have guest editors and should be able to be released as individual aps or ebooks.  These can also be printed on-demand.

• *Questions (summarized from emails and meeting notes):

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  questions questions

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  • What should the business model for the Space Weather Journal be?  Should move to open access with author fee? How can the commentary pieces be supported under that model? 
  • Is there a need for editorial scope change?  How can we better enforce the distinctions to the science research journals such as Radio Science and JGR Space Physics?
  • How should the Quarterly evolve? Should the content expand to highlight related content published in other journals?
  • Is a separate composition/production stream necessary for the Quarterly?  Can we use the production stream created for the new virtual journals to streamline production and enable electronic access? 
  • How to best balance the business model for the quarterly?  What should be the proportion of print versus electronic access?  Should we renew sponsored development and printing?  How do the necessary writing professionals get their support?
  • During this time of transition, how can we best support a continuous stream of the highest quality space weather research papers AND the important news that our stakeholders need to have presented to them? Can we put some attention on the journal/quarterly to better aid the editors in meeting the current production schedule and to smoothly transition into a new production environment?

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