From the Archives / History of The JI

Minutes of The JI Editorial Board (12/28/1937), Annotated

by John S. Emrich, Bryan Peery, and Emily McGowan
January 2014 (web only)

The following is an annotated transcription of the minutes of the December 28, 1937, meeting of the editorial board of The Journal of Immunology. The minutes are reproduced as “What’s Old is New Again: Early Editors of The JI Act to Address Perennial Challenges in the Peer-Review and Editing Process,” the first article in the new “From the Archives” series, which appeared in the January/February 2014 issue of the AAI Newsletter.

MINUTES OF THE MEETING
OF THE EDITORIAL BOARD OF THE
JOURNAL OF IMMUNOLOGY
December 28th, 1937

The second meeting of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Immunology was held in the Hotel Mayflower at dinner, December 28, 1937. Present were Oswald T. Avery, George P. Berry, Jacques Bronfenbrenner, Arthur F. Coca, Alphonse R. Dochez, Michael Heidelberger, Sanford B. Hooker, Earl B. McKinley, Stuart Mudd, Thomas M. Rivers, Carl Ten Broeck and Alexander S. Wiener, and also Barnett Cohen, N. Paul Hudson and C.-E. A. Winslow of the Journal of Bacteriology.

The chief topic of discussion was the same as that at the first meeting. Dr. Coca reported that the editors, especially the associates, have been unnecessarily burdened with the labor of correcting—often practically rewriting—papers which had been carelessly composed and apparently not given any revision in the institutions in which they had originated. Examples of corrected manuscripts were passed around.

Most of those present, including Drs. Winslow and Cohen, expressed themselves in favor of rigorous editing of the English form as well as of the factual content of accepted papers and approved the suggestion that our members and also institutions from which papers are likely to be received be requested to exert all reasonable influence to have papers carefully revised at their source in accordance with our editorial practice.

Respectfully submittedMinutes of the Second Editorial Board Meeting of The JI, December 28, 1937
AAI Archive

Arthur F. Coca
Editor-in-Chief

See also:

• The full article: “What’s Old is New Again: Early Editors of The JI Act to Address Perennial Challenges in the Peer-Review and Editing Process”
• Annotated Minutes of the First Editorial Board Meeting of The Journal of Immunology, March 24, 1937