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An Editor's Farewell: SRL is YOU

The first 20% of the full text of this article appears below.

Lots of jobs are unlike any other, and, as John Ebel knows, and Luciana Astiz is about to find out, editing Seismological Research Letters is one of them. About half the job is familiar to scientists who have had the pleasure of serving as a journal editor: shepherding papers through the review process, acceptance/rejection decisions, that sort of thing. But conceived as something of a noble experiment, SRL is unique, a cross between a journal and a magazine, with a mandate not to publish papers the primary purpose of which is to present new research results.

What SRL does publish remains difficult to define, although the most straightforward category comprises papers that provide a clear service to the Seismological Society of America's community by describing a newly available dataset or software resource. We publish other types of papers as well: informational reports on notable recent earthquakes, informal synthesis papers, papers about studies that might not be seismological research per se but are related to seismology in a way that interests the SSA community. One can point to examples of all these types more easily than one can define them succinctly. The difference, for example, between "informal synthesis" and "shoddy science" can be a bit like the old definition of pornography: You know it when you see it (but good luck explaining it.)

One of the real strengths of SRL is its flexibility to break out of the usually rigid mold for technical journals:

• "Idea" is not a four-letter word. That creature of dark legend, the so-called "idea paper," is welcome, as long as it stays on the right side of the law. We have a place for opinions; we have a place for humor.
  
• Papers that break disciplinary molds are not shunned but rather welcomed. In recent . . . [Full Text of this Article]