Steve - Gary has suggested raising the matter by writing to the BAA Council.

For everyone's info, I have passed on the details of the discussions on this topic to our Business Secretary Ron Johnson, asking him to table this matter for further discussion at the next appropriate Council meeting. Hopefully you will have seen a bcc copy of my e-mail.

Cheers,
Richard

Dear Steve,

I've had a number of papers published in the JBAA and I have to say I have found the process to be both fair and helpful.

Two recent papers spring to mind: first the paper I wrote which discusses my experiences of using the Alvan Clark refractor at Flagstaff, Arizona. I think this would fall into your category of personal experience. I think this sort of thing can still be regarded as a paper since, although it involves a subjective experience, that experience depends on objective facts which appear in the paper(like telescope stats, observing details and so on). When I submitted the paper, I got some useful comments back and suggestions which did help tighten it up.

More recently I co-authored a paper with Damian Peach about observing Uranus. This was more of a scientific paper. After submission there were some disagreement between the referees and ourselves but these were sorted out in a way which suited everyone and it seemed to me that the referee process was robust produced a result which allowed the paper to be published.

Based on these experiences I cannot therefore agree with with your interpretation that the process is not fit for purpose. I also think that the quality of the papers in the JBAA is uniformly good, with a diverse mix appearing the same journal (other journals could do well to see to this!)

I think the above suggestion is a good one, and that perhaps is a line of dialogue to explore. Certainly a council discussion of it is a good idea I think.

Best wishes,
-Paul.

Well! Just as things seemed to be going quiet everything has kicked off again - and in a rather dramatic direction! I shall respond to Richard Miles in a separate post (as his contribution is clearly of a different sort), but here's a few thoughts on Paul Abel's comments.

Firstly, as with previous comments, I thank Paul for taking an interest. Good to know that the topic has attracted several of the Association's more well-known "personalities"! I would still be interested in comments from the silent majority, but perhaps the absence of same means most people simply haven't involved themselves in the papers submission process, which may account for the lack of new faces in the Journal authors list. Again, I'm glad Paul has had good experiences but, once more, this perhaps makes me feel piqued that I didn't!

Paul mentions two of his recent papers. In the case of his submission concerning the Alvan Clark refractor (Vol 121 No.2), his own assessment is indeed spot on - it is an account of his own experiences (and not a scientific paper!). He says it depends on objective facts, and that is clearly true, but he did not have to carry out research to determine these and they do not require data analysis to interpret neither do they lead to any new conclusions. Rather than being a scientific paper, the submission is thus just a well-written and very interesting journalistic article [and I here use "just" in a descriptive rather than pejorative sense!]. It is none the worse for being such, of course, and still fully deserves to be published, but not in the papers section of the Journal.

His second-mentioned paper, on Uranus, (Vol 121 No.4) is an interesting one, as it is a bit of a hybrid. The first section, on the history of observations, would fall into what I have categorised as "Historical, Bibliography and General Review" papers which, according to the strict rules of definition, do not qualify as scientific papers. The second part, on observing Uranus, seems to me to be no different from the recent JBAA articles on "Observing Basics" so should surely have been published as part of this series rather than being appended to the historical review.

Finally, I would agree with Paul that the mix of articles in the Journal is a good one but the desire for a mixture of articles should not be allowed to influence (or even determine) the selection criteria applied to Journal papers.

Steve Holmes

And here's my response to Richard Miles.

I must start by thanking Richard for (presumably) believing that this subject was of sufficient merit to warrant being discussed in Council. Clearly, I myself believe the same thing, so I am grateful to him for taking this initiative to get it included on an upcoming Agenda.

Given that the matter may thus be about to be debated "at a higher level", I think it important for me to clarify the issues as I see them, to remove any lingering worries that I'm just having a moan because my paper wasn't accepted. As I said earlier, I have two areas of concern, the first of which divides into a number of sub-topics:-

1) Is the Association happy that standards of best practice are being universally and uniformly applied to the papers selection and peer-review process, regardless of the author, the subject matter and the referee(s)? In particular:-
1a) Are the standards the JBAA is applying fully and clearly defined? (for example, should full referee reports be returned to authors or not? should referees be asked to comment on "reader interest"? should the names of referees be divulged?)
1b) Are referees fully aware of the standards to which they should be working, and what is expected of them in a report?
1c) Are all the standards to which the JBAA is working, or expects its authors and referees to work, fully and clearly documented in an easily accessible form?
1d) Is sufficient information available to ensure that authors are fully aware of what to expect during the review process and at its conclusion? (for example, what outputs they may expect and whether they have any rights of enquiry).

2) Is the Association happy that the types of submissions currently published as JBAA Papers all fully justify the title of "peer-reviewed scientific journal paper", thus placing them in a similar standing to other such papers published by prestigious scientific bodies.

On this second topic, I have now completed my treatise analysing recent JBAA papers. While by no means a comprehensive dissertation on the subject of scientific papers and peer-review, it should at least help explain my thinking on the present matter. It can be read via the following links (Sorry - I had to split the document into 3, as the Forum software said it was too big to upload in one piece!):-



Steve Holmes

I've been watching this thread for a few days and I think it is time to make some comments.

Firstly, it would not be fair on the author or the referees to discuss specific aspects of Steve's submission in a public forum so I will not do that.

On Steve's general points:

- Guidance for authors is provided online but I agree it could do with a bit of an update. It is generally correct though and most authors make an effort to comply. We are, though, pretty flexible in what we would accept, unlike many professional journals.

- It is correct that, once the paper had been rejected by Council, it is our policy not to enter into further correspondence with the author. This is done for reasons based on past experience. I accept that this is frustrating for the author but such discussions generally go nowhere and they take up a lot of valuable time.

- The referees of each paper are unpaid experts in their field. Their job is to tell me whether the paper is correct, contains interesting material and, yes, whether it is likely to be of interest to our readers. I do not ask them to use their valuable time to copy edit papers, make technical corrections or help the author re-write stuff. That said, many referees will do this but usually only when the paper is likely to get through to publication.

- I'd prefer referees not to be anonymous but sometimes they request this, generally for good reasons such as avoiding interminably long e-mail discussions with the author. I respect their wish.

Over the last few years we've been trying very hard to make the content and layout of the Journal more appealing to our readership and I'm not really worried about the precise definition of a "scientific paper". We are an amateur organisation with a mostly amateur readership and we can use any definition that we want!

I'd certainly be interested in views from everyone else but, to avoid the usual back-and-forth correspondence, I'll back out of the discussion for a week or two before I respond again.

Nick.

My final words on the matter; I think I would agree with everything you've said Nick.

Similarly, I agree the precise definition of a 'scientific paper' would be far too restrictive and quite honestly pointless. What is the point in devising some obscure definition which we then have to rigidly stick to it and see the quality and breadth of papers we get in the JBAA drop away. I would argue, that as long as the material has been peer reviewed and presents some interesting new experience/facts/suggestions to the community- then it is suitable to be published in the JBAA as a paper. The fact that we can do that gives an outlet for material which might otherwise remain unpublished.

I don't really have anything further to add except to reiterate what I said earlier; I have found the process to be fair and helpful and the quality of the JBAA and the papers within it are very good. Moreover, as with all publications, the editor(s) have a right to say what goes in.

Best wishes,
-Paul.