Behind the Scenes at the AAS: Publishing Is Hard!
Peter Williams Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian
This post is adapted from an article on the AAS Journals website:
At the beginning of 2019, a wide cross-section of the astronomical community wrote a bevy of science white papers for the National Academies’ Astro2020 Decadal Survey on Astronomy and Astrophysics. To help support the community in this important undertaking, the AAS took on the job of organizing these white papers and formally publishing them in the open-access Bulletin of the AAS. Not so difficult — just copy all the PDFs to our webserver, right? Hardly. As a new hire working with the AAS Publishing team, I was surprised at the amount of effort that went into this seemingly innocuous process. If you’ve ever been curious about just what it is that publishers do all day, read on to get a taste!
The AAS’s involvement in the process began with delivery of the submitted white papers from the National Academies’ Astro2020 team. But, as so often happens when efforts cross organizational boundaries, even that seemingly simple act required care and attention. The spreadsheet provided to us by the Academies had 590 rows, but the official survey data dump (CSV file) has 583 — and those 583 rows are numbered from 7 to 635. What was up? Our NAS colleagues knew exactly what the differences were between the two listings — and answered all our questions — but whenever you’re handing information from one person to the next there’s friction. And now that I mention it, “handing information from one person to the next” is a pretty essential component of being a publisher, isn’t it?
Astronomers will be familiar with these kinds of friction points — they almost inevitably crop up when you’re combining data from multiple sources or diving into a new kind of data. Indeed, you can probably guess some of the other things that we were involved in tidying up: duplicate submissions, late submissions, malformed files. When you’re the publisher, you’re the one whose job it is to sort these things out — and everyone else knows it.