ANZJS Corner

Over the last year the ANZJS Editors (Kerrie Mengersen, Jeff Wood, Ken Russell and Steve Haslett) have held a number of meetings, including the first face-to-face meeting of the current editorial panel in Sydney on 24 May 2007.

A number of issues were discussed at length.

The Editors have been considering content and direction for ANZJS. Of necessity, this is driven in part by citation indices, but we also recognise that there could be more local content, both in terms of authorship and focus, without detriment to either the Theory and Methods or the Applications sections. We have also discussed how to get more high quality applications papers submitted, and whether the criteria for acceptance of such papers needs reconsideration. We are advertising for a new Book Review Editor. We are looking medium term at a web-accessible system so authors and editors can better monitor submitted papers, and at whether we currently have the best mix of Associate Editors to cover the very wide range of statistics papers submitted to ANZJS. We are working toward focusing some journal issues around invited papers and special topics, with submitted papers on the same or similar topics in the same issue. We are considering how best to support the editors and control workload through widening the group of people involved, for example, through assistance, particularly for Kerrie and Ken.

We were pleased to note that Blackwell, the ANZJS publishers, provide partial funding toward ANZJS operational expenses, and once this is available to the Editors from the two associations there can be more operational flexibility than is possible at present. This could usefully include more regular meetings of the editors.

We are considering whether a questionnaire to you, the journal's subscribers, would be a useful way to canvas your views, and if so, what best to put in it.

A central, more long term question concerns Open Access, and whether this is the best mode for future publication of ANZJS. For those of you wanting to know more, there is a useful background article to which Murray Jorgensen provided a link. This is Jim Pitman's IMS presidential address devoted to "Open Access to Professional Information". The SSAI and NZSA executive committees plan to make sure there is extensive discussion on Open Access and ANZJS at the next meetings of NZSA and SSAI in mid-2008.

We think putting a regular column on ANZJS in the SSAI and NZSA newsletters could be a possibility. That way, we can outline what is happening at ANZJS in more detail, and get more timely feedback from you all.

John Haywood has recently been appointed Associate Technical Editor for ANZJS.

Steve Haslett

Blackwell Synergy

Members were emailed (March, 2007) with instructions and their password from Blackwell Publishing on how to log-on to the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Statistics online directly through Blackwell Synergy (www.blackwell-synergy.com).

Alternatively, check with your library about access to ANZJS online through the subscriber-based providers Ingenta, Ebsco, SwetsWise or OCLC.

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