IT IS ABOUT PEOPLE

Abstract

Griffith Edwards’ essay (Edwards 2006) on the story of the Journal so far gives us a glimpse into the reasons for its rise from obscurity to one of the top specialist journals in the field. One of those reasons is not stated in the piece, but it is surely apparent to anyone to who has taken an interest in the journal over the past 26 years—it is the vision of the man himself. I will not dwell on this, but I raise it because I believe it is important to recognize that any enterprise, whether it be a journal or a government, is dependent ultimately on the vision and enterprise of key individuals and the hard work, intelligence and commitment of many more. Bad systems can be made to work by competent, conscientious and good people and good systems can be made to fail by incompetent, careless or ill-motivated people. We live in a time when it seems that this rather obvious point is being overlooked and when there seems to be an unmerited faith in the ability of ever more cumbersome and intrusive procedures to make up for human failings. I have little doubt that in good time there will be a backlash against this and perhaps we will move on to a more enlightened era, where the emphasis will be on trying to make our human capital as good as it can be. In the meantime, we must do the best we can in a world where red tape is seen as the panacea for human failings. Why do I make such a big issue of this in a commentary about journal publishing? It is because I think it is relevant to the future of high quality specialist journals such as Addiction. On the face of it, things could not be rosier. The Journal receives ever more high-quality submissions, and sales and readership figures are better than one might have dared to hope for in years gone by. But there are pressures in the system. The increasing number of submissions means that there is pressure on the precious resource of people: people to contribute to the editing and refereeing process, people to take the vision forward. At the same time, many countries such as the United Kingdom are engaging in ‘research assessment exercises’ which, alas, devalue journal editing and refereeing as an activity in favour of getting a small number of papers in non-specialist journals that have a high impact factor. In the case of the UK's Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), being editor of a journal can at most count 5% towards the ‘score’ one obtains, whereas publishing papers in non-specialist journals counts 75%. So why do people like myself and Addiction's dedicated team of regional, deputy and assistant editors give up so much time to the journal? Why do we sacrifice RAE ‘brownie points’ in service of the Journal? Not for the money, because none of us is paid personally for the work. Certainly not to make friends, because turning down a valued colleague's papers is no way to cement a friendship. We do it because we care about the field—I personally care about the legacy handed to me by Griffith Edwards and his forebears. We have been handed the torch and we do not want to drop it or let it go out. We are fallible and we make mistakes and we try to develop systems that minimize these. As Griffith Edwards’ history of the journal shows, making a successful journal is all about people—people who see themselves as part of an invisible college working with a shared vision. As long as we have people who care enough about making a contribution through service with a journal, we will find a way to make whatever publishing model we end up with work.