[Journal] FOSS4G 2011 Special Edition

[Barry Rowlingson]

On Wed, Sep 28, 2011 at 3:32 PM, Sunburned Surveyor
<sunburned.surveyor at gmail.com> wrote:
> It seems hard to get enough volunteer support for the Journal as it
> stands. I fear splitting it into two (2) separate publications, one a
> magazine and the other an academic journal, would make this situation
> even worse.
>
> I'm not from academia, but I know getting articles publishes in peer
> reviewed journals is important for those with academic careers, so let
> me ask this question:
>
> Would it seriously damage the value of having a peer reviewed journal
> published in the OSGeo Journal if we had ads? I'm not talking about
> sleezy ads for presecription drugs form some crime mafia drug lab. I'm
> thinking of adds from quality companies offering services related to
> programming and GIS.
>
> If ads would damage the value of peer review publishing in the
> journal, we could shoot for an annual peer reviewed issue with no ads
> in which we ask the authors for a donation to help fund the journal.
> The other "regular" issues could carry ads.

I suspect the advertising revenue from an academic journal would be
pretty minimal. Academic journals don't sit on coffee tables for
browsing. Mostly articles are found via search engines or references
and read (and then often forgotten). Authors also habitually send PDFs
of their articles around on request. Nobody reads it for the ads.

 If you stuck the ads in the middle of the papers (and I don't mean on
a separate page, I mean in the middle of the text) then it might get
some eyeballs, but not much.

 The place for ads is in a more general magazine, the kind of thing
that does look good printed out, where you can sell back cover space,
smaller 1/4 page ads and so on. However ad-spending on the print
sector is massively down. Have you noticed newspapers going out of
business?

 An online version in the magazine style could exist, but it would
have to have some kind of editorial/quality control so it wasn't just
another collection of blogs...

Barry