One Paper On Its Way
Last week, I got word that one of the manuscripts had received final approval from the U.S. Navy Marine Mammal Program for external publication. So, after a round of communication with the other six listed authors, I got down to the business of getting the thing submitted to a journal.
Our pick was the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (JASA). The society is one of the member societies of the American Institute of Physics (AIP). (A perk of membership is the highly readable “Physics Today” magazine.) The AIP has gone a long way toward putting all their journal administration functions online in the form of the “Peer X-Press” system. Peer X-Press apparently has just about everything needed to move a manuscript through all the usual steps to actual print publication. I had encountered it earlier this year in reviewing a paper on odontocete biosonar for JASA.
This was my first outing in using it for manuscript submission, though, and I was prepared for tons of frustration. But, in general, the process went fairly smoothly. Fortunately, my browser and system stayed up throughout the process, so I didn’t test whether it could recover from a session termination without losing all the work to that point. That’s not to say that it went particularly quickly; there was still a lot of information to be entered onto the screens.
I had overlooked a radio button on one form, and the system flagged that and redisplayed all my entered information for that form correctly. The document conversion process seemed to go well, although in my case it didn’t really need to do much (I was already submitting in PDF format).
Do I know who to recommend as an editor? Sure. I clicked on the first letter of his surname, and the editors with names beginning with that letter showed up in a list box. Select and click a button to set it. There was space for suggesting up to five reviewers for the paper, and I filled in all of those. There was space for suggesting the exclusion of five other reviewers (with a box in each case to list the reason why). I didn’t bother with that. Time will tell whether that was a mistake or not.
Eventually, I was rewarded with a page telling me that the paper is officially submitted and presenting the JASA manuscript number.
The paper concerns the measurement of intranarial pressure in bottlenose dolphins during a biosonar task. It gives the methods for our work on investigating sound production for biosonar, and is a logical starting point for the remainder of the work we need to publish concerning this body of data. An earlier version can be seen as chapter 2 of my dissertation.
