Journal Selection

Jim Yoder sent a message to all Joint Program students and WHOI Postdocs encouraging them to use the Agreement to Extend Author's Rights when signing copyright forms for journals. When signed, this document (on the MBL/WHOI website) gives "authors and their employing institutions non-exclusive rights to use, distribute, and reproduce material in electronic digital or print form in activities connected with the author's academic and professional activities."  I always use the form myself, and have never had the publisher disagree.

Of course, copyright policies are only one criterion upon which to base a decision about where to submit a manuscript.  (See, for example, Satyanarayana 2003 or Thompson 2007).  If my own experience is common, scientists struggle with the decision all the time.  Do I choose a prestigious journal, a journal with a short time to publication, a society-sponsored journal, or one with "open access?"   And, since rankings can change over time (see the cool movies at eigenfactor.org) how is one to choose? But, at last, the job has been automated!  Jane (the Journal/Author Name Estimator), can do it for you.  Enter your abstract and click the "find journals" button: up pops a list of best matching journals (from Medline) along with some measure of "confidence"  and "article influence." (I haven't figured out what these mean yet.)  

Better still, those of you who are on the editorial boards of journals know how hard it can be to find appropriate reviewers.  Jane can help with that too!  Cut and paste in the abstract, click on "find authors" and up pops a list along with email addresses.   Testing it out with a few of my own abstracts suggests that it works pretty darn well.

Give it a try---but be warned: it's addictive. [Thanks a lot, Hal Caswell, for pointing Jane out to me.]