[Journal] [Fwd: Re: Next steps]

[Micha Silver]

Up till now the Journal, as I see it, tried to fill in the gaps between 
the individual projects' websites. There were a few articles on 
integration between different FOSS GIS software, some specific technical 
articles - again bridging between different software. And getting 
updates from the whole span of FOSS GIS work in one place was also 
important. It's much easier to picture the FOSS GIS ecology when you 
have this kind of umbrella journal hitting each project over a period of 
several issues.  So disseminating news and information has it's place, 
although not the primary goal. The journal could also server as a forum 
for discussing FOSS GIS issues that are not specific to one project such 
as formats, standardization, licensing, educational uses etc.


I still believe that the slow pace of publication is problematic. For a 
technical,  (perhaps peer-reviewed) article, waiting several months, 
even up to a year, may not be a problem. But for the typical "howto" 
articles, the case studies, the integration examples, waiting that time 
span for an article to appear is just too long. As a simple example, 
imagine an article reviewing the options for a Live GIS CD. The writeup 
six months ago would be totally different than today.


While I like Tyler's suggestion to assign each issue to a different 
"assistant editor", that won't replace having someone as "chief editor" 
to do the pushing and nudging, and keep writers, reviewers, latexers,  
etc in step with the deadlines.


Best regards,

Micha

 

Dimitris Kotzinos wrote:

> 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
>
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