PDFFull Text
The last three issues of Oceanography ranged from a mere 220 pages to a whopping 268 pages. All were “special issues” containing numerous invited peer-reviewed papers relating to the theme or themes of the issue, as well as unsolicited manuscripts that had been peer-reviewed, approved, and were ready for publication. The current, somewhat more petite, issue, while no less special than its predecessors, is not sponsored by any program or funding agency, nor is it devoted to a central theme or themes. It includes a variety of articles on different topics.
Oceanography gratefully accepts manuscripts from all corners of the oceanographic community and passes them along for peer-review and possible publication. We also occasionally invite papers on subjects that might be of interest to our readers. This issue, for example, combines invited and unsolicited articles.
The Oceanography editors would like to entice the community into submitting even more manuscripts, and have been working to make the magazine a more desirable place to publish. Part of the equation is getting to press quickly. All manuscripts we receive are peer-reviewed by at least two people. We endeavor to turn these reviews around within a month, often less, to minimize the time between receipt of the manuscript and going to press. Another part of the equation is graphics quality. As recent contributors to the magazine know, we are picky when it comes to graphics, and often work closely with authors to improve their graphics.
Perhaps a bigger concern for authors is access to their published work. Magazine articles are posted on the magazine’s web site (http://www.tos.org/oceanography) three to four months after hard copies are available. The site is accessible to the public, so that non-members can view published papers, and teachers can download articles for use in the classroom. Items such as book reviews, meeting reports, commentaries, and our education column are available on the web as soon as the magazine goes to press. Google™Scholar (http://scholar.google.com) is currently updating its index with Oceanography content so that articles on the magazine’s web site should come up in searches. And, finally, given the value of citation indexes and counts to our members, we have submitted Oceanography to ISI and requested consideration for inclusion in the Web of Science. I encourage you to send ISI a supportive message through its web site at http://www.isinet.com/forms/journalrec.
Oceanography occupies a unique publishing niche. Although it does not seek to compete with other journals to publish the details of your science, it does compete for your time to produce significant peer-reviewed, publishable work. Please consider publishing in the magazine. It is the perfect venue for explaining your science to a very broad audience and getting readers excited about your research. It’s about cross-disciplinary communication and presenting information in a way that may be used in a graduate-level course. And, please let me know if there is a topic you wish to have covered in the magazine. I would be happy to contact potential authors to write for us.
– Ellen S. Kappel, Editor