Newsletter
Volume 29 | 2006 | Number 1
Society for the Experimental Analysis of Behavior
By Philip N. Hineline, Ph.D. and Victor G. Laties, Ph.D.
The Society for the Experimental Analysis of Behavior (SEAB) was founded in 1957 to meet the legal necessity for a publication to have a publisher and owner. The need for the new publication, the now-venerable Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior (JEAB), arose from difficulties in gaining acceptance for behavior-analytic research in mainstream psychological journals. Details of those circumstances can be found in a collection of reminiscences from those people who were involved in creating the journal. These personal accounts and a more general history of SEAB (Laties, 1987) were published in celebration of the 30 th birthday of SEAB (Hineline & Laties, 1987). As Skinner (1987) recalled:
We had trouble getting our reports published in the regular journals. We used very small numbers of subjects, we did not “design our experiments” with matched groups, our cumulative records did not look like learning curves, and we were asking questions (for example, about schedules) that were not found in “the literature.” At meetings our papers were mixed in with others we seldom wanted to hear. (p. 447)
And as Brady (1987) described, even the Editor of the then-most-prestigious journal on animal behavior and President of APA to boot, was found to be clueless when confronted with simple cumulative records.
C. B. Ferster circulated the proposals that set the new project in motion. Charlie Ferster became JEAB’s first Editor, but many others were heavily involved, especially W. N. Schoenfeld, who sketched the format for the Journal cover, selected the signature colors of green-on-grey, and attended to numerous other details. Nat Schoenfeld also consulted with a commercial publisher who informed him that 500 subscribers would be needed for the journal to be economically viable. The risk that a commercial publisher might impose profit-oriented contingencies upon editorial practice, and his own computations indicating that as few as 50 subscriptions could defray publication costs, led him to propose that the journal’s editorial board be the publisher. Thus it came to pass that the Society for the Experimental Analysis of Behavior was incorporated on October 29, 1957 with JEAB’s initial, sixteen-member Board of Editors serving as its Board of Directors. The first issue was distributed widely during the Eastern Psychological Association meeting in April 1958.
The subscription list grew rapidly, exceeding 1,000 within five years and 2,000 by nine. That healthy circulation produced the sound financial footing needed to found, in 1968, the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis (JABA), in order to publish “…reports of experimental research involving the applications of the analysis of behavior to problems of social importance.”
Today, candidates for election to SEAB are almost always individuals who have served as action editors (editors or associate editors) for either journal. Continuity is achieved through staggered eight-year terms with re-election only possible after rotation off the board for at least one year. The Society has a standard roster of officers, and each journal has a Managing Editor and a Business Manager. The earliest Board meeting was held at the venue of the Eastern Psychological Association. After the founding of Division 25 of the American Psychological Association (APA), the Board met at APA for many years before switching allegiance to the Association for Behavior Analysis in 1988. At first alternating locations with APA, the Board settled in with ABA in 1991.
SEAB's main focus has always been its two journals. To increase their influence and accessibility, SEAB has taken a series of cautious steps into electronic publishing. In October 1994 a Web site was established that provided access to a few free articles in electronic form. Soon each journal had its own “Selected Articles” page, with a single article added from each new issue. This number grew with time, and then, in 2001, all issues published after mid-1996 were made freely available online. Back issues were published online as Adobe PDF files once they were at least two years old.
Electronic accessibility was recently augmented still further with the help of PubMed Central (PMC) of the National Institutes of Health’s National Library of Medicine, which presents the same electronic copies from their server as well. Beginning with journal issues published in 2005, PMC presents each article in the full-text format, featuring links from references to their PubMed abstracts. In addition, each article is also available in PDF format, which provides a more useable printed format. PMC has also scanned and now presents all of our pre-1996 issues, thus making the approximately 6,000 articles on about 60,000 pages electronically available. An important feature of our connection with PMC is that it is entirely independent of our Web site.
Each new journal issue presented on PMC only becomes freely accessible to the general public about six months after publication, which equates to two issues of JABA and three of JEAB. Current subscribers can gain access to the most recent issues from our own Web site, either via a login option or through their institution’s subscription.
The six-month embargo for non-subscribers should help us maintain the economic viability of the journals by encouraging institutions to continue their subscriptions; however, the actions of other journal subscribers will still play a large role in determining SEAB’s financial health. Individual and student subscription rates will deliberately be kept low, with the hope that our decision to grant free access to back issues, rather than selling access to articles, will earn us continued loyalty from all subscribers. By the time SEAB celebrates its 50th birthday in 2007, we should have learned whether or not these decisions were wise.
References
Brady, J. V. (1987). Back to baseline. Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 48, 458-459.
Hineline, P. N. & Laties, V. G. (Eds.) (1987). Anniversaries in Behavior Analysis. Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 48, 439-514.
Laties, V. G. (1987). Society for the experimental analysis of behavior: The first thirty years (1957-1987). Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 48, 495-512.
Skinner, B. F. (1987). Antecedents. Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 48, 447-448.