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BSSA: Worth Thinking About

The Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America (BSSA) is a powerful community project that has helped us share the information necessary to keep our field moving forward since 1911. In some ways, BSSA is much like it has always been, and each issue provides us with a collection of research that has been improved by the peer review process and copyedited, typeset, and printed to make it easily readable. But BSSA has also constantly evolved, and the online edition with full-text searching of all content back to volume 1 and linked references that speed our navigation through the related literature is unlike anything J. C. Branner could have imagined when he edited the first issue.

The value our community places on BSSA is evidenced in ever-increasing numbers of submissions, the rate at which our articles are cited, and even the ferocity with which some authors rebut rejections instead of submitting their work to other journals. Preserving and improving the value of BSSA requires facing our current challenges and careful planning for the future as we adjust to our science's increasing emphasis on large-scale collaborations and to journals' decreasing dependence on print. As a small society, SSA tends to change slowly, so some of these issues have already been faced by other journals we read. This gives us the opportunity to observe their approaches and consider how we can improve on the existing options.

Each change impacts how we submit and read articles, and many changes also have critical financial implications. Beyond printing and mailing the printed issues, we pay for the online submission system, the compositor's work (this mysterious term encompasses the people who copyedit and typeset the articles, lay out the issue, and produce the files for the online and print versions you receive), BSSA's . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Andrew J. Michael, Editor-in-Chief

BSSA
U.S. Geological Survey
bssaeditor@seismosoc.org

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Coming in BSSA

Seismological Research Letters 2009 80: 508-511. [Extract] [Full Text]