Editors' Round Table Discussion

Chair: John Stufken, Professor and Head of Statistics, Department of Statistics, University of Georgia, Athens, USA, Executive Editor of The Journal of Statistical Planning and Inference.

Discussants: Peter Westfall, Professor of Statistics, Department of Information Systems and Quantitative Sciences, Texas Tech University, Senior Editor-elect of The American Statistician, to serve from 2006-2008. David Scott,  Noah Harding Professor of Statistics, Rice University, Houston, TX, USA and formal editor of the Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistic, Jointly published by the American Statistical Association, the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and the Interface Foundation of North America. Nitis Mukhopadhyay,  Professor of Statistics, Department of Statistics, University of Connecticut. Editor-in-Chief, Sequential Analysis. Charlie Colbourn.  Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering Arizona State University, USA

Description:  Publish or perish is a phrase that is familiar to almost all faculty in all disciplines. At research institutions it is virtually impossible to get tenure without an active and successful publication record. To counterbalance this, most disciplines have a wide variety of journals, some broad based and others more specialized, some run by professional societies and others by commercial publishers. Another often heard phrase is indeed that there is a journal for just about any paper. Moreover the world of publishing is changing, or about to change, due to technological developments and open access on-line outlets. Societies and publishers, not always driven by the same objectives, are considering how to deal with this new and still changing landscape. These observations beg for a discussion on such questions as:

    - what can I do to increase my chances of getting a paper accepted?
    - where should I submit my paper?
    - do we have too many journals, or not enough?
    - what can we do to improve the review time, or don't we have a problem?
    - are we happy with the state of publishing in our field? If not, what is wrong?
    - how is publishing going to change over the next years?
    - how are our societies involved in shaping these changes?

A forum, mostly of current and former editors, will start by addressing some of these issues, in part with reference to their own journals, leaving ample room for audience participation.