With this issue, Population Studies celebrates seventy years of publication. It is also the occasion on which John Simons has decided to step down as its Managing Editor, having held the position for 20 years. This remarkable term of service is surpassed only by that of his predecessor, E. Grebenik, whose association with the Journal dated back to its foundation in 1947 and who edited it either jointly or alone from 1954 to 1996.
As Managing Editor, John Simons has been responsible for the editorial policy and content of Population Studies and has either managed or undertaken himself the activities involved in producing the Journal. These activities include overseeing the flow of manuscripts from initial submission through to rejection or handover to the publishers, making an initial cull of submissions, allocating individual papers to the other editors, identifying reviewers, and handling all of the Journal's correspondence with both reviewers and authors.
In addition to these quotidian responsibilities, John Simons has provided the Journal with strategic leadership. The last two decades have been a period of upheaval in academic publishing. John Simons has steered Population Studies through the processes of adopting and adapting to an avalanche of technological innovation and responding to new financial challenges. When he became Managing Editor, the Population Investigation Committee (PIC) published the Journal in-house, its editors undertook the peer-review of submitted papers, and authors did not receive feedback on rejected submissions. At that time, moreover, neither Population Studies nor any of the other demographic journals were published online; business was still conducted by post; aspiring authors were required to send the journal a bundle of printed copies of their manuscript; search engines had yet to become a ubiquitous means of accessing information; and the concept of open-access publication was a work in progress. In addition, the Journal received a steady income from reduced-rate individual subscriptions bundled with society membership dues. All of this has now changed.
The transformation of Population Studies occurred rapidly after 2002 when the PIC contracted Taylor and Francis to publish the Journal on its behalf. The print edition was redesigned and publication of an online edition began. The following year the Journal started to use experts from outside the editorial board as peer reviewers and to feed their reports back to authors. Since 2007 authors have had the option of providing readers with open-access to the online version of their papers on payment of a publication fee. In the 1990s, only individuals who could attend editorial meetings in London in person were recruited as editors. Under John Simons, the editorial board has grown in size and became more international in its composition.
Perhaps John Simons' most notable contribution to the Journal, however, is that for 20 years he has edited everything published in Population Studies for content, accuracy, and writing style. In this aspect of his work, he favoured many of the distinctive stylistic traditions of the Journal established by his predecessor. Sad to say though, the Journal's ‘Instructions for authors’ recently ceased to admonish them that sex is not an abbreviation for sexual intercourse or gender a synonym for sex.
Of course, John Simons' editorial contribution extended beyond copy editing and defence of the Journal’s house style to issues such as the structure of each paper's argument, the completeness, conciseness and relevance of its content, and the precision and clarity of the writing. He has been an extraordinarily conscientious editor and particularly assiduous in his support of less-experienced researchers and authors whose first language is not English. As someone who has published several papers in the Journal during John Simons' period as Editor, I have always found his editing thoughtful, constructive and helpful. When it is advisable, he can be uninhibited in his use of his figurative red pen, but he also thinks long and hard before he intervenes. My papers in Population Studies all ended up clearer and more convincing as a result of his input.
The PIC are enormously grateful to John Simons for his hard work as Managing Editor during the last 20 years and for his contribution to maintaining Population Studies as a leading demographic journal. Working largely in the background, without seeking personal recognition, his efforts have benefited not just the Journal but demography as a whole, both as an academic discipline and as a profession.