Have made time to further follow the discussion / read attachments / view your first draft of a paper entitled "An analysis of periodicities in perturbations by Jupiter to the orbit of dwarf planet Ceres, with application to other major asteroids" for the first time.

Certainly plenty of constructive criticism and useful material has been made available in the course of the online discussions over the past few weeks thanks to the contributions from all concerned and especially from yourself Steve. We should certainly be able to exploit much of this to hone the process of accepting articles and papers for publication in the JBAA. Thanks everyone.

Allow me to broach the concept that a significant fraction of material submitted for publication never sees the light of day by appearing in said publication. There are a whole host of reasons for this but generally speaking having more articles and papers than space to publish is generally a healthy situation. Remember that from time to time some draft articles/papers will inevitably be received which really are unsuitable for publication anywhere. However, your draft paper is certainly not in this category as I found it to be of interest to myself as the current Director of the Asteroids and Remote Planets Section. It is good to see that you used Aldo Vitagliano's SOLEX software to further pursue your initial numerical-based analysis. The question whether or not this should have been revised and reproduced as a JBAA paper is a difficult one.

I remember well a paper I wrote and submitted in 2004 entitled "Methane abundance in Titan’s stratosphere", in which I used photoelectric and CCD observations of the central flash seen during the occultation of 28 Sgr by Titan obtained from two observing sites (both run by amateur astronomers) in 1989 to calculate the concentration of methane in Titan's upper atmosphere - the paper was rejected by a professional astronomer and that was the end of the matter. Looking back on it I certainly believe this was unfair. So like you I have been on the receiving end of what I considered an unfair process.

So yes, let's see how we can further improve matters for future JBAA authors. As I have just published a lengthy theoretical paper in the journal Icarus, I have first-hand experience of how the publisher Elsevier operates and there are a few approaches they use which may be adopted in suitably modified form by the BAA, for example.

The idea of a second publication alongside the Journal has been discussed in the past and indeed has been tried in the past. What has now changed the game is the internet. Needless to say how we best utilise the internet has been a perennial topic for Council. Various approaches can be envisaged: Some BAA observing sections have their own publications which can exist in both paper and in online form, but doing this for ALL sections requires volunteers to come forward to help make these possible. Roger Dymock, my predecessor as Director of ARPS, used to publish "Impact", which was an online section newsletter. In total 23 issues were published between March 2006 and April 2008 and each issue required several days work to compile and edit. If "Impact" was still extant, your draft paper could have been published as an online one. Is there scope for BAA online publishing of material of a more technical nature? Or how about some lengthy technical papers being published as an extended abstract in the Journal and the full article is then made available online? Some professional papers have started to appear with an online Appendix for example, in which items of a more technical nature or which are physically big, or which are best displayed as a high-res PDF are made available.

Finally, how about publishing your paper on astro-ph? It's accessible at:
arxiv.org/archive/astro-ph

I might be able to help you do this.

Richard

Excellent! Two more meaty contributions to reply to. Andrea's first:-

If the Association's Charter does indeed refer only or mainly to the promotion of observations then there might well be reasons for certain classes of submission to be turned down. However, to have a submission rejected because it is "contrary to the Bye-Laws" is quite different from having it initially accepted and then rejected after review. Submissions in the first category should be rejected by the Papers Secretary or JBAA Editor, and of course there should be information about this in the Guidance to Authors so that prospective authors will not waste their time writing inadmissible papers. However, once a paper has passed this hurdle it has clearly been deemed "appropriate to the Journal" and thus suitable for publication if its content is acceptable.

Andrea's comment a) simply affirms the point I was making at the time: judgements of this sort about the acceptability of a submission can only be the opinion of the person making them, not of the whole membership. This is exactly the reason why perceived popularity must not be a criterion for assessing papers. His comment b) contains what I assume is just a "slip of the pen", when he refers to the popularity of "articles" when I was actually talking about "papers". However, what he ends up by saying is perfectly correct - the popularity of "articles" i.e. submissions of a general or journalistic nature, should very definitely be the concern of the Editorial team as that is what makes the Journal interesting as a whole. It does not apply to "papers" though. One does not subscribe to a solely paper-publishing Journal for the pleasure of reading the papers, but because one feels that information will be gained from them. The JBAA is somewhat different, in that it contains both "articles" and "papers" but, as I have said on a number of occasions, the two classes of submission should not be confused. And no, it is obviously not the case that merely having scientific content grants to a submission the right to be published - but then, I've never claimed that it does!

Comment c) is, I think, covered by my preamble. Whether or not a certain class of submission is acceptable is a matter for the Association as a whole and the JBAA Editorial Team in particular, but exclusions must be made explicit, not implicit.

Finally, I am at a loss to understand why Andrea thinks that amateurs attempting to measure up to professionals is "ridiculous" and "snobbish". We clearly cannot equal the volume or span of their work but we can certainly aim to equal its quality and most particularly (and this was the actual point I was making) their professional standards. The reason why we should all strive to do so may be "beyond" Andrea but I hope it will be only too obvious to the bulk of the membership.

Moving on to Richard's excellent contribution, may I say how pleased I am that someone is at last taking a constructive view of all this and accepting that, just possibly, there might be areas where process improvements can be made. I am also gratified that he found my paper interesting!

The suggestions in his last [main] paragraph are all good ones which I feel should very definitely be considered by the Association. As he says, there may be other ways of doing things in this online age. His mention of the other already-existing BAA publications reminds me to highlight my view that some of these might be a better place than the Journal to publish submissions which are not really papers under the standard definition. I do recognise that cost would be an issue if the existing Journal were to be split though, so would re-iterate that publishing both papers and articles in the one Journal is fine as long as the two are not thereby confused.

Finally, I would of course be delighted to publish my paper at "arxiv"! I had rather assumed that this archive was the domain of professionals but, taking my cue from my response to Andrea, I would be very keen to use Richard's expertise to help me stand alongside them - many thanks for the offer. If he could email me some further information at steve.britastro@holmesfamily-UK.net we can see what might be possible.

Steve Holmes

Well - Wednesday is the Big Day, apparently! Richard Miles tells me that Council will be debating the JBAA Papers topic then. I had hoped to liaise with him a bit more about the details but he's been quiet for a few days, possibly because of an "incident" with his PC caused by a power surge (as discussed elsewhere on the Forum!).

However, let's hope Council have a fruitful discussion and take on board something of what has been debated here. There's clearly a lot of interest in the topic, judging by the "views" total (will we make 500?), so it would be a shame if nothing positive came out of it. If there's anything "for public consumption" that I get informed about I shall, of course, be back on the keyboard.

Steve Holmes

I would like to inform members that the subject of 'JBAA Papers' was raised at the Council Meeting held on the afternoon of Wednesday 5th September at Burlington House. In due course, a working group will be set up to look at various aspects of the Journal and other publications. Clearly, the matters raised by Steve Holmes and discussed by six other BAA members on this forum will be valuable input to such a working group. In the meantime, I shall prepare a short document to capture the various points raised in the course of the recent online discussions for due consideration by the working group.

I must point out that activities of any working group set up by Council are of a confidential nature such that details can only be shared with members of Council and other trustees of the Association. If any members would like to become actively involved in the running of the Association then all they need to do is to find two other members who are prepared to nominate them for election to the Council (an annual event, the result of which is announced at the AGM in late October). The annual deadline for nominations is noon on the first Friday in May. For more information see:

britastro.org/baa/images/stories/misc/pd..._articles_bylaws.pdf

and especially Pages 6-7 (Clauses 23-31) and Pages 9-11 (Clauses 8-16).

Sorry if this all sounds a bit formal, it's not meant to be.

Richard Miles