Seismic Isolation Devices: History and Recent Developments

The idea of decoupling a structure from its foundation dated back to 1870 has now been worldwide accepted as a powerful tool to protect structures from earthquake damage. This paper is intended to review the developmental history of concept in seismic isolation devices rather than its applications in engineering. The literature review of more recent developments in seismic isolation is as complete as possible, but there may be considerable degree of omission in the later years because of the page limit and the rapid increase in research interest in this topic in the past years.

Page Limits on Economics Articles: Evidence from Two Journals

Over the past four decades the median length of the papers published in the “top five” economic journals has grown by nearly 300 percent. We study the effects of a page limit policy introduced by the American Economic Review (AER) in mid-2008 and subsequently adopted by the Journal of the European Economic Association (JEEA) in 2009. We find that the imposition of a 40-page limit on submissions led to no change in the flow of new papers to the AER. Instead, authors responded by shortening and reformatting their papers. For JEEA, in contrast, we conclude that the page-limit policy led authors of longer papers to submit to other journals. These results imply that the AER has substantial monopoly power over submissions, while JEEA faces a very competitive market. Evidence from both journals, and from citations to published papers in the top journals, suggests that longer papers are of higher quality than shorter papers, so the loss of longer submissions at JEEA may have led to a drop in quality. Despite a modest impact of the AER's policy on the average length of submissions, the policy had little or no effect on the length of final accepted manuscripts.

Megajournals and what they mean for the future of scientific publishing

Since it launched five years ago, PLOS ONE has redefined the scientific journal. The broad publication criteria and lack of page limit allowed PLOS ONE to grow at a rate never seen before in the industry, to a level where it needed its own category: the Megajournal. Recently, other publishers have sought to emulate the success of PLOS ONE with releases of their own megajournals. These new journals all have similar properties: full Open Access, editorial criteria based on sound science and not on significance or impact, fast turnaround, broad scope. In this talk I shall discuss the features of megajournals, their benefits and weaknesses, and what their arrival means for the future of scientific publishing.

Milestone Developments in Welding and Joining Processes

Welding, like other major manufacturing processes such as casting, metal forming, and material removal, has its roots in ancient times, though not necessarily in the various forms as we know them today. It therefore has a long history, with thousands of articles having been published on various aspects of the welding process over the years. However, there have been periodic reviews of the literature in the past, that summarize significant developments in the field. Thus, due to constraints on page limit, and to avoid unnecessary repetition of what is already well reviewed in the literature, this article will reference the key literature reviews on the subject, providing brief summaries where appropriate. The bulk of the article will then be devoted to more recent developments in the field. Due to the breadth of material to be covered, this review is designed to be more of a summary of key developments rather than a critique of a specific field.