I only hope that as an editor I will improve submitted articles as much as my editors improved my articles. As one of JEP's editorial board members said recently, it's like some fields of science, where you keep redoing your work to get closer and closer approximations, until you can live with the solution. Cliff Stoll's Silicon Snake Oil, his exploration of the dark side of the Internet, made me reflect again on the strange virtual land in which we live. In Silicon Snake Oil he writes that as it becomes easier to publish on line, the quality of online publication will drop. A curious phenomenon is that every year, publishing online gets cheaper and publishing on paper gets more expensive.
Bad money drives out the good.
The Internet is the land of the cheap, the home of the free. This issue of JEP is about what the Post says is the new corporate buzzword, branding. Brands, the Post says, can build on their name recognition. Once a company establishes a solid brand, the possibilities are endless. But for traditional paper publishers, publishing a journal on line can also be risky.