a message from the Editor of Statistics & Computing

[This is a message from Ajay Jasra, new Editor in Chief of Statistics & Computing, regarding submissions (and another stone in Springer’s garden).]

Subject: New Submissions at Statistics and Computing

Dear Prospective Authors,

As you may be aware Springer has introduced a new system for the management of article submissions. Despite my best efforts, there are several missing functionalities which make efficient management of article submissions virtually impossible. We do expect the system to be fixed by the new year, but that does not help us in the short-term.

I would please request all new submissions, until further notice, to be made on the old editorial manager:

https://www.editorialmanager.com/stco/default1.aspx

so that we can properly handle your manuscript.

Kind Regards,

Ajay Jasra
EIC Statistics & Computing

severe testing or severe sabotage? [not a book review]

Last week, I received this new book of Deborah Mayo, which I was looking forward reading and annotating!, but thrice alas, the book had been sabotaged: except for the preface and acknowledgements, the entire book is printed upside down [a minor issue since the entire book is concerned] and with some part of the text cut on each side [a few letters each time but enough to make reading a chore!]. I am thus waiting for a tested copy of the book to start reading it in earnest!

 

barbed WIREs

Maybe childishly, I am fairly unhappy with the way the submission of our Accelerating MCMC review was handled by WIREs Computational Statistics, i.e., Wiley, at the production stage. For some reason, or another, I sent the wrong bibTeX file with my LaTeX document [created using the style file imposed by WIREs]. Rather than pointing out the numerous missing entries, the production staff started working on the paper and sent us a proof with an endless list of queries related to these missing references. When I sent back the corrected LaTeX and bibTeX files, it answered back that it was too late to modify the files as it would “require re-work of [the] already processed paper which is also not a standard process for the journal”. Meaning in clearer terms that Wiley does not want to pay any additional time spent on this paper and that I have to provide from my own “free” time to make up for this mess…

Journal of Statistical Distributions and Applications

I just got an email about a

*Springer* on a new *peer-reviewed, open access journal*

whose sole aim seems to generate more revenue for Springer. Indeed, papers published in this journal are charged $1025 each. Which is about the cost for a single subscription to the overpriced if scientifically excellent Statistics and Computing. (It takes a serious effort to discover the subscription rate of a Springer journal on their website!)

Indeed, I am quite surprised at a journal focussing on statistical distributions. What is a statistical distribution, exactly? The era when one would discover a new probability distribution in connection with a statistical estimation or testing problem and call it t, F, or Beta, seems long long gone! Just as gone as the production of statistical tables.  (This is also why I wrote such a negative review of The Handbook of Fitting Distributions.) The webpage of the journal indicates that

The scopes include, but are not limited to, development and study of statistical distributions, frequentist and Bayesian statistical inference including goodness-of-fit tests, statistical modeling, computational/simulation methods, and data analysis related to statistical distributions. Significant and well-written articles on theory and methods in areas of statistical distributions and their applications will be considered for publication.

but this sounds so broad as to cover almost any statistical paper. So I am wondering at the purpose of this journal, except as an experimentation in “open access” commercial journals that are fully supported by the authors, in essence making grants pay twice for research.

‘gold’ open access & gold mine for publishers

Following a discussion within the IMS publication committee and the coincidental publication of a central double page in Le Monde, weekend science&techno section [not that it was particularly informative!], here are some thoughts of mine on open access and publications:

First, the EU is philosophically inclined toward Open Access and has been putting some money into the game towards that goal:

As of 2014, all articles produced with funding from Horizon 2020 will have to be accessible: articles will

either immediately be made accessible online by the publisher (‘Gold’ open access) – up-front publication costs can be eligible for reimbursement by the European Commission;

or researchers will make their articles available through an open access repository no later than six months (12 months for articles in the fields of social sciences and humanities) after publication (‘Green’ open access).

This means that putting IMS publications on arXiv or on HAL (which is compulsory for CNRS and AERES evaluations, hence for most French public researchers, contrary to what Le Monde states) is fine and sufficient for EU funded research. It seems to be the same in other countries (ok, EU is not yet a country!) like Australia…

My personnal position on the issue is that I do not understand the ‘gold’ open access perspective. Since tax-payers are supporting public-funded research, why should they support the journals that publish this research if it is available on a public depository like arXiv for free? Simply because the publication in the journals gives a validation of the scientific contents? The argument was that it would save money on public libraries subscribing to expensive journals like Elsevier‘s, but paying the ‘gold’ open access is another way of redirecting tax-payers money towards publishers’ pockets, so this sounds like a loophole… I would thus be very much in favour of keeping the arXiv solution as is, since it is the greenest one, as long as we comply with local national regulations.