Code4Lib Midwest Lightning Talk, July 2016
Many thanks to the folks at the University of Chicago for hosting C4L Midwest last week. After hearing some of the presentations and discussions on data plans and availability, I put together a short lightning talk about the data we have at the Code4Lib Journal, or at least what can be cobbled together (literally). Surprise statistic (for me): the percent published and percent rejected, over the history of the journal, are equal.
As Eric Lease Morgan pointed out, most of the data we can’t share from the Journal are confidential. But one of the problems with gathering even shareable data is that it’s messy. As I mentioned in the lightning talk, the two main reasons for this are (1) it’s just not a priority for a volunteer committee, and (2) very few people even ask about the data. Even gathering statistics like “rejected” is difficult, because not all proposals and rejections are tied to a specific issue, and some that are accepted are later rejected for publication. But globally, we can get some generalized statistics.
Ongoing project from this: try to gather editor numbers over time (even trickier since it involves identifying when people came and went, and there’s nothing available, other than emails, to nail that down).