Google Analytics Accounts for New Editors

[Jonathan Brinley]

Hi, again, new editors (and anyone else reading this email).

You don't need, but you might want, access to our Google Analytics
stats. If so, send me your preferred Google account and I'll grant you
access to that, too.

Have a nice day,
Jonathan

--
Jonathan M. Brinley

jonatha...@gmail.com
http://xplus3.net/

[Tom Keays]

I looked at the stats for yesterday. I added in the position of the paper in the issue and author/title. It isn't as clear as it was for the first issue, but the position of the paper in the table of contents does correlate to the number of hits.

Also, because we didn't publish until after mid-day, I suspect the editors contributed to inflating the pageviews of the C4L conference paper (some of the later pageviews were to "preview" views of the article). The same may be true for some of the other articles that were still being tweaked yesterday.

It is also nice to see that some of the older articles were being read. Probably related to this is the fact that 66% of our visitors yesterday were counted as new. Here is an extract of the pageviews >5 (not including the static administrative pages) from yesterday.

Issue	24-Mar-08	URL	Pageviews	Unique Pageviews
	Home	/	407	259
	Issue 2	/issues/issue2	207	86
2.2	Corrado (Subject Guides)	/articles/47	151	88
2.12	Bean (C4L Conference)	/articles/72	92	55
2.1	Morgan (Editorial Issue 2)	/articles/71	69	44
2.3	Darby (Google Calendar)	/articles/46	63	49
2.5	Godby (Bibl Metadata)	/articles/54	61	47
2.7	DeRidder (Googlizing)	/articles/43	57	47
	Issue 1	/issues/issue1	50	36
2.4	Freeland (Geocoding LCSH)	/articles/52	48	42
2.11	Gorman (Authority)	/articles/57	43	35
2.6	Furuta (Help)	/articles/45	35	30
2.8	Foster (Web Design)	/articles/53	30	27
2.9	Scott (Lookup Laptops)	/articles/49	29	22
1.4	Agnew (Rutgers Workflow)	/articles/25	27	17
2.10	Mellinger (ICAP)	/articles/63	22	20
1.2	Sierra (Beyond OPAC 2.0)	/articles/10	16	12
2.12	Bean (C4L Conference)	/articles/72?preview=true	10	2
2.12	Bean (C4L Conference)	/?p=72&preview=true	8	2
1.8	Johnson (Koha Column)	/articles/28	7	7
1.7	Morgan (Open Source Book Review)	/articles/30	7	6
1.3	McGrath (Facets & LCSH)	/articles/23	6	6
1.5	Singer (Communicat)	/articles/24	6	6

[Edward Corrado]

I just poked around mys self. It is pretty interesting looking at the
landing pages, views and everything else. I'm not sure what it all
means, but it will be interesting to see what happens as far as views go
with respect to position. I'm not sure 2 issues is enough to know, but
some trends might appear. It would really be interested to compare this
with the stats from other online journals to see if this trend is unique
to code4lib, or if it is the same with other online journals.

Edward

Tom Keays said the following on 03/25/2008 4:48 PM:

--
Edward M. Corrado
http://www.tcnj.edu/~corrado/
Systems Librarian
The College of New Jersey
403E TCNJ Library
PO Box 7718 Ewing, NJ 08628-0718
Tel: 609.771.3337 Fax: 609.637.5177
Email: cor...@tcnj.edu

[Jonathan Rochkind]

Do we want to actually set a maximum number of articles (or range,
depending on length of articles) we want in an issue? I'm thinking that
maybe the dozen articles or so per issue we have might be a bit much to
be readable. What do you think?

This would of course take place, I guess, starting issue 4 or even
later, depending on when or if we decide to do so. (Already too late for
issue 3, no problem).

Of course, if we think all the articles we're getting really ARE good
articles that deserve publication... then I'm not sure how we'd cap it.
Me, I keep voting against articles that others want in anyway. But
then, sometimes I've voted against articles that I was then happy to see
in the issue after all anyway, so maybe I'm overly negative. I do think
that editors voting may be too hesitant to vote 'no' though; I've seen
people write "Gee, I don't really think this is an appropriate article,
I guess I'll abstain." Heh. I think we could be a bit more selective,
and reduce our number of articles (Another way to do that might be to
change our voting rules. Maybe you need at least 3 people voting 'yes'
to be in; maybe you don't just need more 'yes' than 'no', but like a
supermajority or something). . Also not sure how long the large volume
of good article proposals is going to keep up though, it may not keep up
forever.

Just brainstorming.

Jonathan

[Tom Keays]

I dunno. It's the web ... we aren't bound by physical publishing
limits. Unless we do offer a bound edition. :-P

Here's my take. If I can't read it all today, I bookmark the items I
want to follow up on and catch up later.

But 12 or so may be a reasonable limit simply because doing more is
going to make the limited pool of editors crazy.

Tom

[Edward Corrado]

This is an issue that I've been thinking about as well. Part of the
problem is the rolling acceptance method that has been set up. If we
waited until the deadline for an issue abstract submission date, we
could take the top X article abstracts (leaving room for a few to fall
out from what ever our N goal of articles is). Right now, we really
don't have a good way to deal with this. If we get a flood of really
good article abstracts towards the end of the deadline, they may be
better then ones that have already been accepted. Of course, I am a fan
of the rolling acceptance as it gives authors a head start of working on
n article (or working on finding another place to submit it), so I don't
know how we could fairly limit the number of articles without changing
how we accept abstracts.

Sure, we retain the right to reject an article after it comes in (or
place it in a future issue), but I'd rather not be in a situation where
we are rejecting articles after we have accepted abstracts because we
have too many good articles (that sounds too much like peer-review to
me). I don't mind rejecting more abstracts - if that is what we need to
do to keep the number of articles at a reasonable level -- but if we
want to limit articles, we need a process that is more in line with that
goal.

Edward

Jonathan Rochkind said the following on 03/26/2008 10:21 AM:

--

[Ken Varnum]

I'm in favor of setting a range (say, 8-12 articles). We're currently
doing well in article submissions, but I'd prefer to be a bit
strategic about publishing them. In my ideal world, we'd have enough
articles in hand to publish the next issue and be well on our way to
having the following one nailed down. Having a small pool of
accepted or in-process articles at any time would let also open the
opportunity to publish related articles together.

Perhaps solicited articles could be targeted for a specific issue,
while submissions from the community would be accepted and edited,
with a publication date determined later in the process, rather than
at proposal acceptance?

Ken

[Jodi Schneider]

Typically, we've lost 1-3 accepted articles per issue.  I think shooting for the 8-12 article range is fine, but I think that means that accepting up to 15 articles is ok (as I see it).

We have had requests to publish articles "as they're ready" and I think that we should talk about whether that would work in our flow. Would we publish them in a special RSS feed and eventually bundle them into an issue? Or...?

I like accepting articles as they come. It reduces workload and allows us time to solicit articles to balance an issue. The main disadvantage from my perspective is that we may get 2 articles on very closely related topics, but that seems like a rare enough occurrence. We'll also have to see how successful we are getting articles for issue 3 from those whose articles were accepted early. (Have we given them a deadline?)

-Jodi

[Jonathan Rochkind]

I don't want to publish articles until we're actually done editing them.
Now, if that was before our official issue publish date, I think that
might be fine. But generally, we don't get all of OUR stuff together to
put a stamp of approval on an article until just before publish date.
It's the deadline that makes us do it. :)

I _would_ be happy to have the coordinating editor give a menu of what
the articles will be as soon as we know for sure what they'll be. But
that also depends on us knowing for sure what they'll be which, since we
ask for a few changes from authors up to the end, we might not really
know for sure in advance. It would be sad to announce an upcoming
article, and then have it not actually show up.

Jonathan

>> http://www.tcnj.edu/~corrado/ <http://www.tcnj.edu/%7Ecorrado/>

>> Systems Librarian
>> The College of New Jersey
>> 403E TCNJ Library
>> PO Box 7718 Ewing, NJ 08628-0718
>> Tel: 609.771.3337 Fax: 609.637.5177
>> Email: cor...@tcnj.edu
>>
>>
>>
>
> >
>
>

--
Jonathan Rochkind
Digital Services Software Engineer
The Sheridan Libraries
Johns Hopkins University
410.516.8886
rochkind (at) jhu.edu

[Carol Bean]

Jodi Schneider wrote:
> Typically, we've lost 1-3 accepted articles per issue.  I think shooting for
> the 8-12 article range is fine, but I think that means that accepting up to
> 15 articles is ok (as I see it).

+1
I think we were pretty fortunate with the crop we got this time.  8 is probably a good minimum number to shoot for,  and 12 is a good cap, even if we have to fudge once or twice.  Do "column" pieces, or the coordinating editor's introduction count in that total?
 

>
> We have had requests to publish articles "as they're ready" and I think that
> we should talk about whether that would work in our flow. Would we publish
> them in a special RSS feed and eventually bundle them into an issue? Or...?
>

Hmm, interesting idea.  I wonder if that would put (maybe unintended) pressure on authors to finish an article to get it into the RSS feeds.  I also wonder how many of the current articles we could have done that with (noting how articles have a way of being tweaked right up to the last minute sometimes).

Carol
 

--
Carol Bean
bean...@gmail.com

[Edward Corrado]

I guess I kind of like the idea of the articles coming out all together.
I can see an argument for soft releases of articles, but I like the big
splash of a full issue better. I think with an issue every 3 months,
that it really isn't that long of a delay.

Edward

Jonathan Rochkind said the following on 03/26/2008 11:56 AM:

[Carol Bean]

On Wed, Mar 26, 2008 at 12:21 PM, Edward Corrado <cor...@tcnj.edu> wrote:

I guess I kind of like the idea of the articles coming out all together.
I can see an argument for soft releases of articles, but I like the big
splash of a full issue better. I think with an issue every 3 months,
that it really isn't that long of a delay.

Edward

Also gives slow readers a chance to catch up ;)

Carol
 

--
Carol Bean
bean...@gmail.com

[Ron Peterson]

I think putting out issues rather than releasing articles as the come in has worked well. Releasing articles as they come in is going to make it much more difficult to manage for the Coordinating Editor, put more pressure on the assigned editor, and lead to more things falling through the cracks. From the amount of email on the c4lj-articles list over the past month, it is obvious that getting these articles ready for publication requires a lot of energy. Targeting an issue makes it easier to focus that effort rather than always juggling articles and proposals in different states. So I think we should continue to publish as issues.

Ron

----- Original Message ----
From: Edward Corrado <cor...@tcnj.edu>
To: c4lj-d...@googlegroups.com
Sent: Wednesday, March 26, 2008 12:21:06 PM
Subject: [c4lj] Re: capping articles for an issue?

I guess I kind of like the idea of the articles coming out all together.
I can see an argument for soft releases of articles, but I like the big
splash of a full issue better. I think with an issue every 3 months,
that it really isn't that long of a delay.

Edward

Jonathan Rochkind said the following on 03/26/2008 11:56 AM: