Editorial: State of the journal, February 2010

We have now completed our second full year of publication and, looking at the statistics regarding submissions and results (described further below), it appears that we are finally stabilizing—several papers are in process as compared to the previous two years. Launching a new journal was more volatile than we had suspected, and getting appropriate submissions was much more difficult than we expected—more comments on this below. In summary, although Volume 2 for 2009 was intentionally rather thin, the journal now appears to be in good shape for the future. We have 10 papers almost ready for the next issue (a double issue, we suspect), 14 papers in the revise-and-resubmit phase, and 5 in the initial-submission review stage. With new conferences at POMS, EurOMA, Academy of Management, INFORMS, and DSI coming up, we should be in good shape for the future as well. In terms of market reception to our efforts (that is, are we profitable or not?), we have been trying to get a handle on this but the marketplace is not as straightforward as it used to be with individual personal subscriptions and individual library subscriptions. These days, publishers make most of their income through “syndicates” and “packages” of electronic subscriptions where various journals are bundled together and libraries subscribe to the packages they desire. [Sounds a bit like those nasty “bundles” of mortgage securities and CDOs (collateralized debt obligations), doesn’t it?] As our publisher, Springer, explains: “Consortia, multi-site, and site licenses are all referred to as ‘online deals.’ In 2008, OMR was covered in 68 such ‘online deals,’ resulting in 3262 institutions having exposure to OMR.” Geographically, those institutions break down as follows: 8 in Africa, 286 in the Americas, 730 in Australasia, and 2238 in Europe. Given that we are “exposed” to over three thousand universities and other institutions, that seems rather decent for just two years of publishing. Surprisingly, there seems to be a lot more OMR “interest” (or at least “deals”) in Europe than in the Americas. We don’t know if this is due to non-American institutions being more interested in electronic access (maybe American institutions still prefer, and have the funds to pay for, hard copy subscriptions?), or if the appeal of a journal with material relevant to, and readable by, real managers is of more interest to nonAmerican researchers. We note that authorship to date has been almost even between U.S.A. authors and non-US authors, although the preponderance of submissions is from non-US authors. This also means, unfortunately, that nonUS authors are getting rejected more often than US authors. Why? Looking over our records, there are a few reasons, all primarily related to desk rejections. Many papers have been desk rejected because they fail to offer value in terms of both practice and theory. Such papers typically do have theoretical value, but their value to practitioners either falls far short or is simply non-existent. These papers usually come in the form of an elaborate mathematical model being presented, which includes proofs, derivations, lemmas and the like. These rejected papers also frequently employ data sets that are of the “toy” variety. That is, data sets that are synthesized to illustrate the model of interest, but do not shed any light on real-world implementations of the problem. This is not to suggest an aversion to papers including mathematical models. Mathematical models are J. R. Meredith (*) : P. R. McMullen 3109 Worrell Professional Center, Schools of Business, Wake Forest University, P.O. Box 7659, Winston-Salem, NC 27109, USA e-mail: jom@mba.wfu.edu