Ron Johnston and Tony Champion have both raised questions about the page
lengths of Area and Transactions and the role of RGS-IBG and specifically
RHED in decisions on page length. Ron raised the issue in the context of
the 'ownership' of the journals. This response relates specifically to
Transactions.

On length: RGS-IBG has NOT and, as far as I am aware (editors are not
members of RHED), do NOT intend to reduce 'normal' page lengths for the
journal. This is currently set at 128 pages per  issue of Transactions.

What RHED has done is to turn down a request from me, with the backing of the
Publications Committee, in January 1996  for a limited increase in page
length during 1996; and to refuse a further request made, as invited by
RGS-IBG at the time of budgetary preparations in the summer of 1997, for a
budgeted increase in page length  (+16 per cent) in Transactions during
1997.

These requests were made to help ease the backlog of papers  created by the
exceptional (??) circumstances of three sucessive record yearsof
submissions. The problem is that these decisions by RHED (about which I
knew nothing) cause great difficultes in scheduling publication of papers
and reviews.
It now seems that a more limited increase in page length should be possible
for1997.

Part of the (very complex!) background to this is that Transactions
exceeded its budgeted  length in1996 by 13 per cent and  so exceeded its
budget by12 per cent. This was due to me as editor. Hence the requests for
extra pages and hence, I guess, the refusal to increase page length in
1997 although the refusals on page length were, apparently, also
influenced by serious inaccuracies in the financial data available to the RHED
committee when making its decisions.

On ownership, the position is clear: the title and copyright are in the
legal ownership of  RGS-IBG which earns a very substantial surplus over
costs on them (even when budgets are exceeded!) and there is, therefore, a
legitimate interest in what happens to the surplus. But  the content and
all the work that that goes into it are owned by those who do the work:
readers, authors, referees.

Involvement (reading, writing, refereeing - even editing, I hope) in the
journal is, clearly, open to anyone with a scholarly interest in its work
whether inside or a million miles outside RGS-IBG.  It could hardly be
otherwise and, in my view, it is part of the editor's job of a journal
published by a scholarly society to promote the interests of those who
produce (through reading, writing, refereeing) it.This isone of the
benefits of such a journal compared to those produced commercially  as
commodities and exchange values.

Ownership through the work of scholarship is a fantastic resource being
made even ever more accessible and powerful as electronic Transactions
grows in coverageand moves towards real-time electronic publishing,
thereby facilitating new geographies of involvement in the journal.
An editor can clearly have a very formative role in facilitating the
construction of such geographies.

And what of a new editor? I finish at the end of 1997and the last issue for
which i am responsible will be 23.1 (1998). But the reserve of accepted
papers means that a replacement should really be in place by early 1997 so
that s/he can take decisions on papers to appear from 23.2 (1998). Any  takers?

Roger Lee

roger lee
department of geography
queen mary
university of london
mile end road
london  e1    4ns

telephone       0171 975 5410
fax                        0181 981 6276
                or          0171 975 5500




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