It’s hard being popular…

Due to the very welcome fact of the BJPS’s ever increasing popularity, we’ve been forced to make some tough decisions. All print journals work with tight page budgets, which in our case has been fixed by joint agreement between the BSPS and our publishers, OUP. The upshot of this is that it’s often impossible to publish everything we would like to. Competition for space has always been fierce in the BJPS and, as the last few years have seen a 50% increase in submissions to the Journal, things have become that much tougher. One obvious way to accommodate this would be to increase the page budget, with its knock-on effect on the price of the journal. Although we are increasing our page budget slightly, we did not want to affect the cost to our readers more than is strictly necessary. The Journal is at the more affordable end of a very pricey market and we’d like it to stay there.

Another option is to impose a strict word limit. The BJPS has never had a word limit and we’ve felt this was a strength of the journal—sometimes a detailed case study or involved set of proofs is essential. So we’ve settled on a compromise: We will continue to accept longer papers, but anything over 10,000 words will need an accompanying letter justifying the wordiness. And beware! If your paper is going to take up more space than most, the bar for publication will be all the higher.

Brevity: the soul of wit and the watchword of the BJPS author!