[Journal] [Fwd: Re: Next steps]

[Dimitris Kotzinos]

Hi Tyler, all

i think that the discussion is reaching an interesting point, and this
is in my opinion the character that we want the Journal to have. I will
put forward my opinion on that but before I would like to comment on the
number of issues / timing matter:
I think that we should be a bit careful and pragmatic. I think that
going from one issue (or even none if we do not count the Annual Report,
and I think that we should not) to 4 issues per year is a giant step
forward and we should make sure before that we can support it. As far as
I know and understand I think that 4 issues is a really tough issue to
handle as we are at the moment.

So back to the Journal's character:
I think that the Journal's character and scope should cover as much as
possible the needs of the community but not all of them at once and
should be able to bring new people into the crowd.
So I do not agree for example that the basic aim of the journal should
be to disseminate news and release information about the OSGeo Projects.
All projects have associated web sites and even blogs that do the
dissemination job properly, so in that sense my question is: what is the
added value that one would find in a Journal like that beyond project
news (please do not misunderstand me: I think that we still need to
disseminate project news but this cannot be our core idea).

So I suggest that we have in each issue:
- one invited vision paper (that could be the issue theme)
- a sub-issue dedicated to academics with different ISSN and a review
committee so as to eventually make it a respectable scientific journal
- the rest as they are, but a bit more "edited" to comply with the
general idea
- we should also disconnect the Annual Report from the Journal (or just
have it as an annual special issue every March)
I won't elaborate more but this suggestion brings some work to the
journal's committee already so I would like to be more careful towards
how much we ask.

But I think that the discussion on what kind of journal we want is a
crucial one.

Sorry for the e-mail's length,

Dimitris