From the Editor

We continue our discussion of the format and content of this journal, quoting from our complaint department. First, a few items on the mechanics of journals: "A good journal should reach the readers on the day designated on the cover, my July ('62) issue arrived on 14 July." Applied Optics, believe it or not, is much more prompt in its appearance than most of the other physics journals. Our mailing date from the printer is five days before the first of the month; therefore most of you should re­ceive the journal close to the first of the month, even in California. For reasons of economy, however, the journal is sent second class, and some delays in delivery may be due to your local post office. I t is also true that in July the printer ran out of those little yellow postcard inserts inviting people to subscribe and waited a week or so for a reorder. (Several of you have said you dislike these inserts, and so does your Editor, but they do appear to produce subscriptions, so for the present we must tolerate them.)

"I received only the front cover of the March 1962 number." We had a number of these complaints, and we have taken two steps to cure this: We have changed the gluing process of at­taching the cover; and we now mail in a paper wrapper, which costs more, but which has greatly reduced the number of defec­tive and lost copies. Your Editor, by the way, would appreciate a postcard complaint about any faulty mailings: some copies intended for Miss. went to Mass. and for N.H. to N.D. We cannot correct these failings if we do not know about them.

"I will not submit papers to you unless I can see the galley proof." We have not enforced the no-galley rule as rigorously as some of you suspect. After a very short time, we found that we could not adhere to this practice, and galleys of all papers and Letters are now sent to all authors. We included such a statement in the early Information for Contributors to discourage those authors who send in a preliminary version of their results with the thought that later data or even drastic changes in the conclusions might be inserted in galley. This practice is time consuming and expensive, can disrupt the mock-up of an issue, and can even delay the appearance of the entire issue. Even two or three galleys returned to authors who neglect to return them promptly can delay an issue. Our hope was and is that a rule such as this might make the author prepare his manuscript more carefully. As it is, it appears that a distressing proportion of our authors do not heed the Information for Contributors,

We have had several complaints about authors' abstracts: they are not sufficiently informative; they are simply rewrites of the title or the introduction. This problem is not peculiar to Applied Optics; the AIP Publications Board has also given thought to this matter. There are now several scientific journals devoted to abstracting the literature: Physics Abstracts, Chemical Abstracts, Meteorological Abstracts, and many others. In about 9 of every 10 abstracts used in these abstract journals, the one originally prepared by the author is selected. Having to rewrite an ab­

stract delays the time between the appearance of the original article in print and the publication of the abstract journal and, in addition, requires a larger technical staff to scan the article and write the abstract. We are attempting to improve the qual­ity of our abstracts. Our reviewers and referees are now asked specifically to consider the quality of the abstract of papers under review, and each author is now reminded that his abstract may appear verbatim: does it contain the essence of the article? While we speak of abstracts, we should mention those authors who practice the art of Abstractsmanship, the ability to write an abstract that is better than the paper itself. This sort of abstract is ordinarily sent to program committees to assure the author a place on the program. There is an interesting discus­sion of this art in Proc. Inst. Radio Engrs. 51, 241 (1963), in which two authors relate how they submitted to a nationally sponsored meeting an elaborate abstract describing "the Linotron, a practical solid-state device for the implementation of majority logic." (I t was simply a flowery description of a resistor.) The paper was promptly accepted. This, we hasten to add, could not happen in our journal, as every paper is reviewed prior to ac­ceptance by at least two readers.

Let us turn to another topic: the pros and cons of featuring a specific topic or technical area in each issue. While this practice appears to be popular with our readers, it has caused more editorial difficulties and headaches than all other problems com­bined. One must remember that more than two years of edi­torial planning and discussion preceded the appearance of our first issue. (This is indeed the case with each issue.) Some of these discussions concerned the question of how such a new journal without a solid reputation could attract readers or even papers and in particular, how we could do this without treading on the toes of J. Opt. Soc. Am. We early resolved that we should concentrate on bringing back to the Society those groups who were tending more and more to split into subdisciplines (such as the UV or IR) and on offering a haven to the optical pumping papers. The next problem was practical: optical applications are so varied that no single editor could possibly be knowledgeable in the entire field. We were therefore led almost inevitably to designate Feature Editors, each responsible for a given area of optics. They, in turn, would draw on close knowl­edge of specialized topics to stimulate or elicit papers for issues featuring those topics.

Our problems began when our Feature Editors went to work with such enthusiasm that each of them received many more papers than we could include in his issue. (Remember that we do operate on a budget, and we were intended as a 100-page per issue journal.) With this surplus began the complex problem of spill-over of papers into later issues that were also already crowded. As the first few issues appeared and were favorably received, we also began to receive contributed manuscripts in many areas other than those announced as features. And there is no one so impatient as an impatient author. He has invested years in his research study and agony in the writing; having finally sent the paper to the journal, he is properly eager to see it in print. The world has been waiting since before Newton for this paper on the optical anisotropy of infrared laser beams from

May 1963 / Vol. 2, No. 5 / APPLIED OPTICS 463

spacecraft: what should we do it the manuscript arrives just after our Laser, Space, or Infrared issue?

At our early editorial meetings, some people argued against featured topics: if an issue is devoted to a feature we are either encouraging a paper before it has ripened naturally or else we are delaying reportable research to a later suitable feature. In either case, they argued, we are introducing an unnatural order. The progress of human history has been chiefly motivated to dethroning the privileged, and there is nothing so democratic as the queue: get in line; wait your turn; first come, first served. We should print papers strictly in the order received. On the other hand, some have said that a featured topic inconveniences the authors in order to accommodate the readers: if many papers on ultraviolet are gathered together, they have more impact on the reader than the same papers strewn through several issues. There is some hope here that the whole becomes greater than the sum of the parts. Take, for example, the papers of our January 1963 issue featuring astrometric astronomy. In one paper, we learn that 25 of the 48 stars nearest the sun are members of

visual binaries or triples, but that we cannot yet distinguish whether the displacement is due to a planetary system of negligible luminosity or to a luminous stellar companion. Other papers discuss improvements of telescope-image quality; improvement of seeing characteristics by balloon astronomy or space telescopes; still other papers describe techniques for substantial improve­ments in the luminosity of spectrometers. Putting all of these discussions together might stimulate someone to the next step in answering this intriguing question.

Now that we are a monthly, some have suggested alternating featured topics with issues devoted simply to contributed papers. Perhaps this will not be necessary; as a monthly we may be able to keep up with our influx of papers. Your Editor does not mean to imply that he does not appreciate enthusiastic Feature Editors; indeed our success is largely due to them: crown them with daphne. But the contributed papers demonstrate that this journal was needed, features or no, and we must also strive to serve this need.

JOHN N. HOWARD

464 APPLIED OPTICS / Vol. 2, No. 5 / May 1963