STHC-L: The Science, Technology and Health Care Archives Forum

RE: Appraisal of scientific journal files

• Date: Tue Mar 25 09:41:47 1997
• To: sthc-l@library.ucla.edu
• From: James Carson (s) <JCarson@cap.org>
• Subject: RE: Appraisal of scientific journal files
• Message-ID: FFDCF3F4@cap.org

Dear all:

I'm interested in this topic not because I have any experience with the 
appraisal of editorial records, but because I'm in the midst of a project 
which may well generate such a problem for one of my successors in the 
future.

My employer, the College of American Pathologists, is celebrating its 50th 
anniversary in 1997 (probably the major reason I'm hear, actually).  One of 
the anniversary projects is a book-length history of the College, for which 
I'm serving as staff editor and sometime co-author.

I think this is actually going to be quite a nice piece of work when it's 
done,  and one of the reasons is that the eleven chapters either have been, 
or hopefully will be, published first as articles in *Archives of Pathology 
and Laboratory Medicine*, and thus are going through the normal peer-review 
process for that journal.  As it happens, just a couple of weeks ago, in one 
of my many letters to the editor-in-chief of the project, I made some rather 
unflattering comments about the (in my opinion) uneven quality of the 
reviewer comments we've received as part of this process.   So I suppose one 
of my successors will have to decide what to do about that letter.....

I offer this for whatever it may be worth.

James G. Carson
Archivist, College of American Pathologists
Northfield, IL
jcarson@cap.org