A Letter from the General Editors to our subscribers
As we are in our second year as General Editors of mexicon, we wish to take this opportunity to address the health of our journal. mexicon is now in its 45th year of service to scholars of Middle American archaeology and culture. As we all know, academic publishing of all kinds has faced many and many new challenges in this millennium. Especially in the face of these challenges, we have much to be pleased with after our first 15 months.
Since we jointly took on the responsibility for content, we have increased the rigor of the review process while at the same time we have taken a more active role in communicating with potential authors about individual submissions and special editions. We are regularly speaking with colleagues about publishing in mexicon. Often, these discussions become the seedlings to be harvested as impactful publications later. And, of course, we look forward to submissions by you, our readers, as we move into mexicon’s future.
As our publisher, Anton Saurwein, noted a few months ago, we published more pages in 2022 than ever before. This is especially striking in the content of reduced submissions throughout academia during the Covid pandemic. One of the factors that has contributed to the increasing volume of mexicon is the expansion of the size of the manuscripts submitted. We can now accept and publish manuscripts up to 70,000 characters, provided that they stand up to our increasing editorial rigor. It is also important to know that, in a world where all academic subscriptions have been dropping, mexicon increased its number of subscribers in 2022.
Another approach to improvement is that we are moving towards being an indexed journal which will attract more submissions and reflect mexicon’s academic standards and editorial rigor. For authors, publishing in an indexed journal will bring greater visibility, discoverability and recognition.
Readers on the other hand will know that mexicon holds up to the highest standards of accuracy, transparency and reliability with every issue they hold in their hands.
One of mexicon’s strengths and also one of its weaknesses is that the journal is and has always been produced by an entirely volunteer team. We have the fortune of the strongest layout team the journal has seen in Annkatrin Benz, Stephan Günther, and Guido Krempel, who rotate duties and have done a wonderful job of keeping us error free and on time. New team members, especially Dominick van der Notelaer and Yannick Dreessen, have strengthened to the timeliness and quality of our News section. Also joining us is Cory Sills who ensures that our American presence will continue far into the future.
Our readers are as much a part of mexicon as our editors. Our goal is to continually improve this journal and to increase its impact in our field while we address the challenges of academic publishing. Most importantly, we seek to provide an outlet for increasingly high quality and growing quantity of cutting-edge information about Mesoamerica for our readers.
Nikolai Grube & Thomas Guderjan