The future of Oil IT Journal

Editor Neil McNaughton reflects on the state of publishing and the role that Oil IT Journal has played over the years, providing curated content and skipping the advertorials. Looking to the future he proposes an action plan to expand coverage and ‘ownership’, with the constitution of an editorial board, ‘official’ DOIs and a move to quarterly publication.

Writing in the Journal of Petroleum Technology, SPE president Olivier Houzé took a ‘cold look at the quality of SPE publications’. Houzé was inspired by one disillusioned member who opined that ‘The quality of SPE papers is going down the drain. … however bad a paper is, it will find an event to be accepted and make it to OnePetro’. Houzé is concerned that poor paper quality ‘could affect the value and impact of SPE’s generative AI deliverables’. While a human reader can filter out poor quality, the LLM is likely to assimilate the good and the not so good, all of which will be retrieved by future users.

A recent publication from the US Academy of Sciences highlighted another issue, the ‘The misalignment of incentives in academic publishing.’ While the original purpose of academic journals was to disseminate scientific research. …. ‘this goal has become entangled with serving the academic prestige economy’. This encourages scientists to publish ‘in ways that maximize their metrics’ which in turn leads scientists to ‘prioritize novelty and sensationalize findings with the hope of publishing in prestigious journals’. PNAS also takes a swipe at ‘commercial publishing companies’ that leverage both knowledge dissemination and academic recognition to ‘generate huge profits in the process’. Commercial publishing companies’ profit margins can approach those of big tech companies such as Google and Apple!

Which leads me to the following thoughts regarding the future of Oil IT Journal, which has been published since 1996, almost 30 years. During that period we have, I think, avoided some of the above problems with publication quality (by our constant battle with marketing puffery) and misaligned incentives (there are none, all material is at our discretion).

But, as most of you know, Oil IT Journal it is largely the work of its editor and publisher, Neil McNaughton (myself). As I am of a ‘certain age’, it behooves me to think about the future of our publication. My main concern is to transform Oil IT Journal from a periodical written by myself to something more permanent that can carry on with less, or even no involvement from me. This leads me to the following thoughts…

1. I am looking for interested parties to act as an editorial board to advise on future direction and content for the publication. If you are interested, please write me with your thoughts.
2. I want to share the writing load more broadly and will in future be looking for input in the form of editorials and articles from our readers.
3. It has been a while since we surveyed our readership to see what articles and topics are key and what are not so important. We will be soliciting input from our readers (subscribers and otherwise) to fine tune and refocus our coverage.
4. For some time we have had a space on the website for original papers that allow for a longer form than that offered by the Journal. The current archive can be accessed here.
5. Oil IT Journal has now been accepted into the publishing community of Crossref. Oil IT Journal now has its own DOI which means that there is a significant interest in publishing with us in that your work will be monitored, indexed and visible to the world wide research community. Papers and suitable articles are now integrated with the Crossref network. See for instance this recent editorial https://doi.org/10.69894/857213.
6. To cover future possible evolution of the status of Oil IT Journal and its associated published papers we have set up (currently squatted) a ‘.org’ website viz https://oilit.org.
7. Publication interval and pricing. Our current six issues per year publication schedule leaves us little time for these activities. We are therefore moving to a quarterly publication schedule, four issues per year. Our coverage will remain as complete as ever, hopefully with a renewed focus on what our readers want to read.

I look forward to hearing your thoughts on all of the above. Email me at info@oilit.com.

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