JAWRA Blog

I am pleased to announce the selection of Y. Jun Xu of Louisiana State University as the new JAWRA Associate Editor for Geospatial Analysis. Jun received his BS from Beijing Forest University, and an M.S. and Ph.D. from Göttingen University, Germany. He has worked in the U.S. since 1997, first at Virginia Tech, then at LSU since 2002. Jun already is familiar with AWRA and JAWRA, having published with us and served as a reviewer.

Jun has a strong interest in applying remote sensing to hydrologic applications. He feels remote sensing journals tend to focus heavily on the instruments themselves, leaving an opening for JAWRA to look at the hydrologic interpretation of the output. I think he will be a great complement to our skill set.

Welcome, Jun, to our team!

We are rethinking how JAWRA articles are presented in the “Literature Cited” section. Current practice is to include volume, issue and pages in the citation, as, for example,”46(1):17-28″. This venerable format may be coming to the end of its useful life.

First of all, we’re publishing more Featured Collections. The articles in such collections often refer to others in the same issue. Since the authors obviously don’t know page numbers until layout is complete, we have to go back in and make adjustments almost literally at the last minute. (Ask me how I spent this Wednesday afternoon!) Besides the work and inconvenience, there’s plenty of potential for error here.

Secondly, page numbers are almost useless for the online version. And, anyone with the printed journal in hand can easily look up the article in the table of contents.

Looming in the wings in an obvious candidate for addition: the Digital Object Identifier (DOI). This funny sequence of numbers is an international standard, a unique identifier and pointer to the online version. See an earlier post explaining the DOI.

One proposal we’re considering is to include only issue and volume and to add the DOI.

Comments?

I am pleased to announce the selection of Venki Uddameri of Texas A&M University-Kingsville as JAWRA Associate Editor for Subsurface Hydrology. Venki has an outstanding background, including strong publications and previous involvement with AWRA. Welcome Venki!

This was a difficult selection, as I chose Venki from an outstanding group of candidates. I thank all those who tossed their hat into the ring.

I recently was asked if JAWRA accepts opinion articles. Here’s what I replied:

Opinion articles are welcome in JAWRA provided they are fact-based. That is, “I think A because of B and C.” Naturally, all sources must be properly cited. We are particularly interested in articles which give a unique perspective on a topical issue or which enlighten us on the views of decision makers.

I once sent a paper authored by a Chinese scientist to a highly-qualified English-speaking reviewer in Greece. The English was somewhat problematic, but I thought it might be good enough for review. The reviewer returned it saying he could hardly understand the English at all.

This true story illustrates why we are so insistent upon authors using standard English. The problem, ironically, is that English is a second language for many of our readers and reviewers. I grew up in New York hearing all kinds of accents and syntactical variations of English and became pretty good at parsing non-standard grammar. However, if you’re already struggling to deal with English syntax, text that breaks the rules likely will be very confusing.

It is unfair to ask reviewers to review a paper in a language they cannot fully understand. Therefore, one of my initial screening criteria is language. If your English skills are weak, the best thing you can do to improve your chances of getting your paper into review is to have it reviewed by a good English editor BEFORE submitting it.

Our Wiley-Blackwell production partners have alerted us that overly-long abstracts are causing problems with page layout. Our limit is 200 words, and some have been going 330 and more. This crowds out the footnotes, keywords, and citation information.

Once again, an abstract is NOT the whole paper! It should concisely summarize what you did and what you found.

Like Garrison Keillor’s description of a good sermon, an abstract should have a strong beginning and a strong ending … and the two should not be all that far apart!

We just came upon a good example of why one should strictly follow the International System of Units (SI), as defined in http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/introduction.html . An author represented a flow rate, cubic meters per second, as “cms” instead of the standard, m³/s. Nobody caught this in review, so the copy editor saw a non-SI unit. Not understanding “cms” was meant to represent a flow, they thought it meant the plural of centimeter and corrected it to the standard “cm”.

Using cms is a throwback to the old cubic feet per second abbreviation, cfs. While not as ambiguous as cms, cfs still requires users to interpret an arcane form. It’s one of the reasons most of the world has left English units behind.

Bottom line: Use SI or risk having to write an erratum.

I’m just back from Seattle, where AWRA held a very successful Annual Conference. One of the many events was the presentation of the 2009 Boggess Award to Dustin Garrick, Katharine Jacobs, and Gregg Garfin – see my earlier post on this. Dustin (dustingarrick@gmail.com) asked that I post the acknowledgment below on the blog. Congratulations to all!

“The authors wish to credit the stakeholders – led by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and the Arizona Department of Water Resources – for their invaluable contribution to the manuscript at all stages from study design through execution. This paper is part of a larger multidisciplinary effort to enhance water supply reliability in the Lower Colorado River Basin by incorporating climate and paleohydrological information into river operations modeling and management. The project team also evaluates economic and management tools capable of mitigating the impacts of water supply variability during prolonged dry-year conditions. Research tasks share an interdisciplinary methodology driven by active stakeholder engagement. At the project’s outset, the University of Arizona team solicited feedback from water managers and users to refine the research scope and identify the core decision support challenges and research questions. This engagement process began in 2004 amidst unprecedented reservoir declines in the Colorado River system and provided the impetus and inspiration for the research and manuscript that received the 2008 Boggess Award. To date the project has produced a range of outcomes linking climate science and water management, including 20 publications and a number of workshops or focus group sessions. Support for the research has been provided by the University of Arizona Water Sustainability Program and the Bureau of Reclamation. More information on the project, publications, and stakeholders is available online at: http://www.azwaterinstitute.org/ewsr.html .”

Open Access. The concept is shaking up the publishing industry more than anything since the printing press. At its heart is a noble desire to disseminate knowledge as widely as possible, regardless of one’s means. But, it runs into the practical realities of economics, copyright, and how the web is run.

Websites offer great economies of scale, but they can not be run for free. I know. I’ve managed a huge public website (water.usgs.gov). Content must be organized, authenticated, checked for quality, maintained to changing standards, updated as needed (discussions, replies, and errata come to mind), monitored, and made available at high speeds all the time. You can’t do this on the cheap, which, unfortunately, seems the fate of too many government and university repositories. Maintenance is not glamorous, but once you put a journal paper online, you must serve it forever.

In an earlier posting, I talked about some of the problems which occur when duplicate, unofficial copies of papers appear on the open web. Nevertheless, some natural-resources agencies are beginning to insist the research they fund be made freely available to the public. The Wiley-Blackwell answer to this is OnlineOpen, whereby authors pay a fee to make the official online copy of their paper available to all. The process is compliant with all major public-access requirements. Authors and institutions are freed of the burden of serving the paper. Search engines see a single version for classifying and ranking. The paper is presented in the context of its journal, where it may be compared to other papers and more properly evaluated by readers. AWRA and Wiley-Blackwell have an obvious interest in making sure JAWRA’s content remains current and adjusts to current standards.

OnlineOpen papers can be identified on our website with the green “Free” icon next to their title. (Some papers are temporarily made free for promotional purposes as well.) Overall, I think OnlineOpen is a win-win situation for those who need it. Researchers get their work distributed in a legal, effective manner under an economically sustainable publishing model.

The preferred target of a link to a JAWRA paper is its abstract. Viewable by anyone, the abstract gives concise information about the paper, links to the PDF and HTML versions, provides instructions to those who do not have access, and links to related papers.

The simplest way to construct the link is to find the abstract with your browser, then cut-and-past the URL. Here’s an example with a recent paper:

Garrick, Dustin, Katharine Jacobs, and Gregg Garfin, 2008. Models, Assumptions, and Stakeholders: Planning for Water Supply Variability in the Colorado River Basin. Journal of the American Water Resources Association, (JAWRA) 44(2):381-398. DOI: 10.1111/j.1752-1688.2007.00154.x

You can find this paper in the April, 2008 issue (Vol. 44, No. 2) table of contents. Then, just click “Abstract” and this address appears at the top of your browser:  http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/119414237/abstract .

The above URL is fairly persistent, since AWRA and Wiley-Blackwell have an interest in making it so. However, for those who insist on a long-lived URL, you can use the Digital Object Identifier (DOI):

http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1752-1688.2007.00154.x .

Now you know what those strange numbers at the end of a citation do! For more information on Digital Object Identifiers, see http://www.doi.org .