In January of 2001 the average production time—that is, the average time required for an accepted manuscript to appear in print after its receipt at American Meteorological Society (AMS) Headquarters—for AMS journals was over eight months. This was clearly unacceptable to authors, editors, and the Society as a whole. Production times had grown worse over a several-year period as the journals grew faster than the staffing at Headquarters did, and a serious backlog developed.
Strategic staffing increases, starting in 2000 but continuing through 2001, of technical and copy editors and editorial assistants, as well as a streamlining of the editing procedures, began the process of reducing the backlog while maintaining a high level of editorial quality and, hence, improving the production times. The press used by the Society, Allen Press, also committed to improvements in their part of the production process. The result is that, by January of 2002, several of the journals had reached the target goal of 150-day production time and the average for the aggregate of the journals was 156 days for the issues published that month. The staff took advantage of opportunities as they arose to have some journals reach the 150-day goal sooner than others, but the commitment on the part of the Headquarters staff is that each of the journals will have production times at or below 150 days as soon as possible and continuing into the future.
Figure 1 is the production time for the Journal of Applied Meteorology (JAM;t0) from January of 2001 to February of 2002 (the last month for which issue data were available when this issue went to press). Figure 2 shows the same information for all journals. The improvement seen in both figures is dramatic. Authors can now have confidence that their papers will be published with all due speed and accuracy in AMS journals.
I congratulate the Publications Department staff at AMS Headquarters for aggressively addressing this issue and bringing production time down to the target level.
Avg production time (days) Jan 2001–Feb 2002 for JAM.
Citation: Journal of Applied Meteorology 41, 6; 10.1175/1520-0450(2002)041<0605:E>2.0.CO;2
Avg production time (days) Jan 2001–Feb 2002 for all journals.
Citation: Journal of Applied Meteorology 41, 6; 10.1175/1520-0450(2002)041<0605:E>2.0.CO;2
