PJCS: Making history in science publishing

YOU CAN SAY WE MADE HAY while the sun shone in Los Baños, Laguna in the Philippines in the early years of this millennium; then we applied it on the field. I'm talking about the Philippine Journal of Crop Science, PJCS, of which I was Editor in Chief from issue April 2001 to issue April 2008. This journal, published by the Crop Science Society of the Philippines, CSSP, was 2 years late in fact when I came in. I applied for the job anyway, because it was impossible to make it ever up-to-date after decades of being late, and I love to do the impossible. Why not? No pain, no gain. No pressure, no pleasure!

It was going to challenge every little skill I had: technical writing and technical editing of papers written in the broad fields of agriculture and forestry. Above all, it was going to challenge what expertise I had in desktop publishing, because I said I was going to do the desktop publishing of the journal myself.

What happened? The ever-late crop science journal was the immovable object, but I was the irresistible force. As the cover image of the August 2005 issue implies, my ally in the making the impossible happen was the personal computer, specifically Microsoft Windows and Word XP, later moving on to Word 2003. I made this high-end word processing software created by Bill Gates as my desktop publishing program of choice. Why? Because I knew Word 2003 in and out, and I knew technical editing and journal publishing in and out, and I knew that the software and the science on paper would match, perfectly.

And that made all the difference. And so the Philippine Journal of Crop Science became up to date on May 2006; in fact, it was at the same time 1 year in advance (see related story, 'We are the most advanced knowledge base in crops in the whole science world,' this blog. I'm not the Editor anymore as I write this; perhaps they have forgotten me, but I have the unforgettable experience of updating a whole technical journal where everyone else in CSSP failed in the last 30 years.