There seems to be some wishful thinking about the power of internet technology to launch new journals.

The fact that online journals can be set up with an off-the-shelf system, does not mean that people will read them or that authors will submit papers of value.

Many specialist journals already exist, with concise names.

Now it seems that many new journals try to distinguish themselves by adding terms such as 'global' or 'universal' to what might otherwise be a concise title. In the past, publishers were more modest, and made do with 'national', or 'international'.

A star example of successful open access publishing is the PLoS collection of journals. The Public Library of Science (PLoS) started with a single journal, and has been gradually expanding, over many years.

Time is needed to build up the support of contributors, reviewers, editors, readers, and academic organisations. Such support, from many people, is needed for any journal to flourish.

Any new journal needs to show how it has obtained such support, or how it can hope to build such support.

Unfortunately, numerous new journal editors or managers are trying to establish entire families of journals almost instantaneously. Since it is clearly impossible to do this and build the necessary support networks at the same time, potential contributors must look carefully at what each journal offers, what it will cost in comparison to other journals (i.e. what payment the contributor is expected to make) -- and whether there is any true academic merit in having original work published in a new journal that is unlikely to have continuity and a long future.

Authors must also beware of the fact that if they do not have to pay until after the paper is accepted, they may have trouble getting the paper accepted by another journal because the first journal has already accepted the paper. This form of delayed payment can in fact be a trap that makes it difficult to retract a paper from the submission and publishing process, if the author realises too late that the cost is going to be too high. So again - beware!

It is likely that more new journals fail than succeed - soon after being launched, and despite the sincere efforts of their owners and editors.

Establishing a new journal that fills a gap in the academic publishing world requires a huge amount of dedication by many people. If authors are asked to make large payments in order to publish in journals with no history or reputation, they should at least be able to see how those funds are really used. A new journal should be investing any income in making the journal better.

Unscrupulous journal owners could try to establish a journal with the primary intention of using author fees for the income of the journal owner, without being able to provide any service of value in return.

Some major existing academic publishers also charge high fees, for profit, but they can do this because their journals have a reputation that is valuable to the author, are known to have support within the academic community, and have access to appropriate and skilled reviewers and editors. There are reasons to be concerned about how such journals are managed and priced, and new publishers cannot expect authors to contribute articles and pay high costs when the journal is not already well known.

To give authors more confidence in a new journal, it might be useful if author payments are not made to journal account, but to an author-controlled account that the author can use -- at his or her discretion -- to directly pay the editors and copywriters involved in producing a publication, and to the web-hosting company for a stated fraction of the journal hosting costs, and eventually to the journal owner. The margin that then goes to the journal owner could then be made transparent, and might appear more reasonable.

Unfortunately, making online payments, and negotiating prices, is difficult for many people, for a variety of reasons, so this idea may not be practical.

To produce a serious journal does involve numerous costs, and these costs are greatest for journals that:

(a) lack a volunteer support network, and

(b) mainly attract contributions from authors who are not experienced writers, and whose work therefore needs more attention from reviewers and copy-editors.

A volunteer support network can be provided by an existing academic Society, for example, if such a Society decides to publish a journal.

My advice to authors is to look carefully at how costs are explained, the identity and qualifications of the journal owners and managing editors, and evidence for academic support from reviewers, academic societies, and so on.

Meanwhile, I invite authors not to contribute to the above-mentioned " Universal Journal of Global Studies of Everything " as this journal does not exist (I hope). This joke title also includes redundancy, something that I see all too often in my own work as an editor. As the non-editor of the above non-journal, I take full responsibility.

I do encourage authors to seriously investigate any new journal that might offer to handle their papers Our network has been designed in part to assist new publishers, in addition to well-established and well-known publishers.

The fact that our network offers support to a journal is no guarantee that the journal will succeed, or that the journal is suitable for an author's work, or that the journal owners really have the capacity to build and maintain a journal that they have launched.

If a sincere attempt to start a journal does eventually fail, then all participants in the fiasco (authors, reviewers, editors, and journal owners) may nevertheless learn useful lessons.

FINAL NOTE: a quick way to discover many new online publishing efforts is to conduct a keyword search on phrases used in the explanatory section of an existing new online journal.

The titles of many new online journals show similarities and repetition ("the Global this", "International that", and "Universal other"), and so do their contents!

See for example, a Google search on the phrase "except in the form of an abstract or as part of a published lecture, or thesis" (from an author guidelines section).

This phrase has been used by many different publishers, which suggests a large amount of automation (and possibly plagiarisation) in the very process of establishing new journals.

Work on the book is nearing an end (see recent posts on editing at the first proof stage , and building a book production team ).

We have finished checking the chapter third proofs one-by-one for the printing company. We still had a significant amount of punctuation to correct, and reference research to complete.

I wish publishers could require authors to do editing for other authors, in return for publishing a paper and open access. This would raise awareness among authors of the effort needed to prepare publications, and perhaps encourage more authors to care more about the details of their own writing.

Half of the difficulty of publishing lies in checking the mountain of detail that has to be corrected to produce something that readers might trust and want to read.

Having said all that, there is also fun in crafting a book and anticipating the final product. Our museum has a cheerful copy-editor who has stayed calm in the face of daily disaster.

I had an idea tonight. I would like to explain this to everyone in our network, with a one, two, three - and a four!

1. Please visit our network whenever you forsee a need for help with a research writing and publishing project.

2. Please visit our network whenever you forsee having time or interest to help with research writing and publishing projects.

3. Let people know what you are thinking well ahead with a notice in the forum, or on your Research Co-op blog page (see 'My page'), or any group for a specific area of research communication.

Now here is the key point:

4. When more people start thinking weeks or months ahead, for this kind of work, and leaving tracks for others to follow, it will become easier and easier for everyone to make useful connections.

The networking synergies could become quite remarkable then.

I hope there will a splash or an echo somewhere, when this idea lands... :-)

Hi. I'm still working in that book (see recent post on building a book production team ). Now we have chapter first proofs coming back one-by-one from the printing company. Most are OK. All I need to do for them is check punctuation and complete details for an occasional reference.

A few I did not previously fully read after they had been reviewed and then revised by the authors. I have been making major editorial decisions on wording changes and deleting entire paragraphs of text. One paper appears to have originated as cut and paste from the author's original thesis. The author does not seem to have fully read the paper. He or she probably never looked at a hard copy, with the pages spread out on a table, to get a complete overview of structure and content.

Perhaps the worst problem is that many figures submitted by the authors have not been designed with any understanding of the limits of resolution on a book page. Typically, the inset maps on a sketch map have text labels that were copied directly from a previously larger map. The result is text that will be about 2 points or less in font size in the final copy.... vanishingly small.

The authors have no sense of how to maintain proportions within a figure, so that all parts are legible in the final result. It is not hard to do. Authors just need to think a few steps ahead.

Actually, it is mostly the younger authors who are producing poor figures. Most of the senior contributors already know how to design good figures.

As an editor, I should have been thinking perhaps five steps ahead. I should have attacked this problem much sooner. I should also be patient, and understand that I have a teaching role here, in my correspondence with the authors.

Que sera sera.

I will do what I can do in the next few days. We still have a second proof to improve matters with.

It is not often that we have many members online at the same time, but today I was at our site when a request for help with editing came. Here is the exchange that followed. The author starting this exchange is still looking for someone, so please do contact him if you can help in some way!

Note that I am also adding keyword tags to this blog post so that people who are interested in the topic have a chance to find this message, when using the Internet.

Peter (Admin., Osaka)

• Muobarak J Tuorkey

  Hi all, I have written an article entitled as "Targeting tumor necrosis factor alpha in diabetic rats could approve avenues for an efficient strategy for diabetic therapy". However, I need a native English speaker to check readability of my article, could I find help

• 14:51
• Me

  Dear Muobarak,

• Please use the forum for editing requests, here: http://researchcooperative.org/forum/categories/editing-requests/listForCategory

• 14:53
• Me

  and... you can also ask here in our group for editors and proofreaders:

• http://researchcooperative.org/group/editorsproofreaders

• Muobarak J Tuorkey

  Okay, I will try to check these options, thank you very much for you kind direction, :-)

• Me

  We also have a group for 'Health and Medicine' where you might find someone with a particular interest in the subject of your work:

• http://researchcooperative.org/group/healthandmedicine

• Thanks for asking!

At 6 p.m. it turns dark, here in the farming district of Muko-machi, on the southern side of Kyoto City. Usually I am not at home when the town loudspeakers play music to call farmers home from the fields.

Today is Saturday, and I was in our family garden this afternoon, digging up a late harvest of taro, and digging in some fishmeal, oystershells, and lime to prepare the ground for spring potatoes, which we will plant in a few weeks from now.

I have no idea where our fishmeal, oystershells, and lime come from.

The taro corms I dug were all from local Japanese varieties, which of course came from somewhere else, centuries ago.

And the music that calls the farmers home comes from somewhere else again: Eastern Europe. Czechoslovakia:Dvok's ' From the New World ' symphony. The Japanese names vary, but include " Way to Home ", and " Sunset on the Distant Mountains ", phrases that appear in Japanese lyrics for songs that use theDvok melody.

Since a few years ago, I have adopted Kyoto as the place where I keep a garden, and Kyoto has adopted me. This city has plants, people, and melodies from many places, adopted over many centuries.

It is the same everywhere. Culture is a bricolage.

The idea of 'cultural purity' is a sterile fantasy. All living societies invent and adopt and adapt. Local identity flourishes on a compost of fragments of the world.

It seems inevitable that sterile societies must die... but maybe no society is ever completely sterile, or ever completely dies; something remains, something is remembered; people carry on under new names, in new places -- or in the same place, under new circumstances.

Most people want a balance of continuity and change. The ideal balance is a mirage, a vision of something indistinct on a distant road. We can never reach the ideal, but we can at least enjoy the vision, or a hope for balance.

There are not many farmers left in Muko-machi. This is no mirage.

The village is becoming a town is becoming a city. Construction companies are busy filling in fields with new drains, streets and houses, between two new train stations.

Water, the transporter of nutrients, the wealth of farmers, has been put underground, out of sight. The sound of Dvok's "Way to Home" may be a distant memory soon, or forgotten entirely. Car parking spaces surround the houses. Elderly couples walk with their elderly dogs and wish for more children on the streets. The remaining farmers return home with creaking bones, arthritic fingers, tired shoulders. A friendly vending machine offers the comfort of hot coffee, cold beer, or a cup of sake.

What music can bring young people back into the land?

Perhaps it is too late if we must ask them to come.

Perhaps the answer is to somehow bring land back into the city, to fertilise our cities with leaves and branches from the forest, straw from the fields, with the fermented dung of animals, to lay down soil on the parking lots and roof tops. Open the drains and bring back the living streams and rivers.

It could happen when the global supply lines freeze.

It could happen when nature discovers that the city of a sterile society is empty (the forest can walk).

It could happen when a new Dvok composes a new melody calling us to new world in our home.

Meanwhile, I'd just like to give thanks to the old Dvok, and thanks to the farmers who looked after the land for thousands of years before us.

There is food in the pot, and music in the air.

( Antonn Dvok, Czech composer (1841-1904) courtesy Wikmedia Commons, 11th Feb, 2012)

Our group  Research Group Bloggers is a place where members can introduce any research- or communication-related blogs of potential interest to our members, from within our network or beyond.

Of course it did not start with nothing, but in just one night I was able to pull together a book production team to meet our deadline with the printer last Monday.

We already had a full set of manuscripts and the basic book design ready, but I could see a wall of logistical impossibility fast approaching. I was heading for a crash.

First I had to break down the work into smaller tasks, and then I could delegate.

Here's what happened, when I looked though our Research Cooperative members list:

1. Copyediting the reference list at the end of each chapter - found  Julie Martin in the USA (previously recommended to me by a friend in New Zealand).

2. Copyediting the main text of each chapter - Julie recommended another Co-op member in the USA, Elizabeth Humphrey .

3. Cross-checking references, in the text and reference list of each chapter - found a highly experienced, but retired researcher in New Zealand, with a general interest in the subject of our book, and some spare time: Richard Benton , also a Co-op member.

4. General problem spotting and checking figures - contacted Mark Smith , a Research Cooperative member here in Osaka, to come to the museum and look for problems of any sort, alongside my Research Assistant Ms Etsuko Tabuchi (also a Co-op member). Mark came, and settled into checking figures for each chapter, then continued the work at home.

5. Drawing new figures - we found several figures that either had to be abandoned or redrawn; Tabuchi-san gave herself a crash course in computer graphics, and has fashioned a number of excellent maps in a short amount of time. (Truly, it would help if more authors could employ illustrators to produce maps, if they cannot to the work themselves, when submitting papers for publication!)

I will pay them all a fair price (I hope it is fair!) soon. They have already done most of what was needed.

We are on schedule!

While the team dealt with all these technical details, I could give time to further substantive editing, co-ordination with our authors, and co-ordination with my main co-editor.

Tomorrow we will begin work on the first proofs, I expect.

5. Indexing - found an expert indexer, Mary Coe (also a Co-op member). She has already read our chapters, and is ready to jump into the last-minute indexing process when the second or third proofs arrive -- with page numbers added.

I will write again when we have a book to announce!

Addendum: see a related discussion of cartography 'standards'.