Following the release of the Nelson Memo late last summer from the U.S. Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), the industry has been buzzing about the potential effects these recommendations regarding U.S. federal funders’ policies will have on access to federally funded research. Will the recommendations force hybrid and subscription-based journals to flip to Gold Open Access or can these journals’ business models survive and still be in compliance with the U.S. funders’ expected policies of immediate public access? How will these changes be implemented? Where will the funding come from for authors who want to pay APCs to make their articles immediately publicly available? I will leave those questions to the Scholarly Kitchen, as the chefs have done a lot of thoughtful pondering on these subjects in recent months.
Box plots are an excellent way to show detailed information about data with a range of values. Editorial office personnel are often asked to report on key indicators for their journal which do not inherently have a single value, such as the time to initial decision.
Are you reporting what you think is a key value in your performance reports? Does that statistic tell the whole story? Does your audience take away a full data-derived understanding of your journal stakeholder behaviors? Are you basing processing protocols off data points without full context?
100% bar charts are used to compare items of unequal value, such as comparing submissions from a partial years to previous completed years or comparing manuscript types from countries with low submission volumes to the countries with high submission volumes.
When you create charts to present your journal data, it is important to note which of the many possible dates you used.
