1) We write it. The majority of the editors (myself excluded) are in the regular writing rotation.

2) We recruit it. Most of our guest authors were approached by one of us to write for us as opposed to submissions (which we actually get very few of – but would be happy to get more of – hence the call in this piece).

We’ve actually turned down very few articles, but again, we’ve had very few unsolicited submissions.

I think the recruitment allows us to approach people we are already impressed by and does help with quality, but it also hurts us in terms of getting a broader diversity of voices since we are limited by who we come into contact with (again, hence the call in this piece).

But when the articles are as LONG as as yours, I think a feed of just ‘briefs’ with click through to fulltext might be a useful alternative. Depending on how your feed reader works, those very long articles can disrupt the reading the experience for everything else.

I REALLY like what you’re doing, you’re getting a kind of content, intelligently written, long-form thoughtful essays that are based on facts and evidence but not afraid to draw a rhetorical line of argument and take a stand — that for whatever reason Code4Lib journal is not getting (even on technical issues).

I’m curious how you’ve managed to get this great content, not necesarily because I want to copy it at Code4Lib journal (I think we’re both occupying different useful niches at this point), but just cause I’m curious how you managed to be so succesful here.

Also interested in how many articles you turn down — you don’t publish any stinkers, not sure if that’s becuase you’re turning lots of articles down or only attracting the right folks or what.

In some ways, I think it might actually be to your benefit that you don’t look like “a journal” — I think C4LJ, by “looking like a journal” ends up attracting submissions that are actually of _poorer_ quality, that we need to weed out (sometimes controversially). It would take a longer post to explain why I think this is so, but think of all of the terrible boilerplate “1. Literature Review. 2. Findings 3. Conclusion” articles you see in “real journals”, that don’t actually have anything valuable to add to the discourse.

I feel the same way Ellie does about feeds that require me to click through for the full text. Echoing Ellie, it’s good to read a persuasive argument that forces me to look past my biases.

As far as I can remember, none of our authors (or potential authors) have specifically discussed the tenure process as a reason for wanting or not wanting to write for us. But I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that some busy people passed us by because we wouldn’t be considered in their portfolio. Hence the line in the article about our interest in exploring boundaries.

We’ll look into the separate ‘in brief’ feed. I know we’re looking into a site redesign as well, so I’ll add that to our list of desired features. I personally hate all feeds that make me click through for content and almost always immediately unsubscribe when I realize that’s how they’re set up, so I hadn’t looked past my own biases on that one. And thanks for including us in your aggregator! I don’t follow our stats very closely so one of the other editors may be able to comment if they saw a spike.

I’m an editor at the Code4Lib Journal, and we also use a non-blind peer review process. I wrote up some about why I think this actually leads to BETTER content then a blinded process would here: http://bibwild.wordpress.com/2012/06/06/code4lib-journal-and-peer-review/

But we still occasionally get people saying “My tenure process won’t pay attention unless it’s blinded peer review.” (My answer is basically, sorry, that’s your institution’s problem). I wonder if you’ll run into that too.

Would be interesting for we less-traditional non-blinded peer review publications, especially both in the library sector, to compare notes.

On the RSS issue: You have noted most of your readers are RSS readers. You also note you added an ‘in brief’ to the top of each article. If possible, you might consider offering an RSS feed that’s _only_ of the ‘in briefs’. Your RSS feed now contains entire article text, and your articles get LONG. A feed of just the ‘in briefs’ (where the feed links were still to the full articles) would let peopel see in briefs and decide to click through.

I’m also the ‘editor’ of the planet.code4lib.org feed aggregator. About a month ago I added your feed to that aggregator (I love your content). That may or may not have resulted in a spike of feed-reading-audience, depending on how your statistics are gathered. But a ‘brief only’ RSS feed would be useful there; as it is now, the articles are so long they make it hard to read the rest of the feed (but I leave em there anyway cause I love what you’re doing and want to advertise it).