On the Origins of The American Journal of Economics and Sociology: Its Purposes and Objectives

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, The, April, 2001 by Will Lissner

He continued to resist and I continued to ask until finally he broke down and slowly began to send things in.

We had gotten one decided criticism about the Journal when the first issue came out: one economist at the University of Pennsylvania made the comment that he thought we were desperately trying to be scientific by using technical terms. When he kidded us about that in public I immediately made a rule that our authors could always use the scientific language of economics and sociology but adroitly had to define it. That was a good rule for it made for greater clarity.

Throughout all the planning and the final publication of the Journal I was, of course, still working at the Times.

Things went along okay until there came a period when prices were going up and the colleges and universities were going through a budget crunch so they began to sell anything they could in order to add to their endowments. In this period academic publishers saw a chance to make a profit on scientific journals by raising the subscription rates and by charging the authors of scientific reports page charges for printing them. By then the Journal was well established but I feared that, with scientific journal subscription rates rising, libraries would have difficulty with their budgets for such journals and would have to get rid of some of these publications. Naturally I was afraid that one of the publications would be ours. I was happy when it turned out that the libraries were not canceling any of our subscriptions. Instead they seemed to be canceling more of the scientific journals that the academic publishers had bought. Nevertheless, we made a special effort not to raise the Journal's subscription rate at t hat time and I refused to establish the practice of page charging authors.

I would like to make clear that these actions did not apply to all academic publishers of that period. I know of one that maintained the highest ethics, JAI Press. JAI Press, although it published and acquired many scientific journals, never tried to make a profit by exacting page charges against authors.

Around this time we had two other problems. The first was the worry about whether we would have our paper supply for printing the Journal cut off. America had joined the Allies in the Second World War and paper was scarce. But that worry never happened. The government had a bank of writers, members of the administration in Washington, writing articles about the war and discussing its problems. We were glad to publish these articles and the administration realized that the public's need to know about what was going on in the war was very important.

The second problem we had was not so much a worry as an uncertainty. I wanted to help in the war effort, of course, but I was pulled in two different ways. I didn't know if the government was going to insist on my joining the war effort by going down to Washington and working in the Pentagon, where I would be working long, long hours and would have no time to work on anything else, especially not the Journal. I had been given a test for every type of secret clearance except for the Q clearance for nuclear energy and I had passed with flying colors. Immediately the administration offered me a Colonel's commission to become an aide to the Chief of Staff. I accepted the fact I would have to go if they claimed it was necessary.