Journal of Official Statistics (JOS)

The Journal of Official Statistics (JOS) was launched in 1985. It is published by Statistics Sweden, the National Statistical Institute of Sweden. It replaced the then-century-old Statistisk tidskrift (Statistical Review). The ambition was to make JOS an internationally recognized communication medium on methodology and policy matters facing national statistical institutes and other producers of statistics. The language is English. The intended readers are working primarily at statistical agencies or in universities or private organizations and dealing with problems that concern aspects of official statistics and other production of statistics.

JOS functions as any other respected journal. All in-scope submissions are sent to referees for evaluation, and an associate editor together with the chief editor make the editorial decision for each manuscript. The number of associate editors has grown over the years from 5 in 1985 to 40 in 2007. The proportion of accepted manuscripts is approximately 22%. Examples of topics include new methods, interesting applications of known methods, comparative studies of different methods, authoritative expositions of methods in a certain field, and discussions of policy issues.

It is believed that the official statistics community has an unexploited potential for producing methodological articles. It seems that government statisticians publish less frequently than other professionals involved in statistics. Documents often remain at the draft stage without any international circulation. Sometimes these authors do not have to publish, and incentives to publish are not provided by their agencies. In consequence, many valuable contributions remain within the home-agency and do not initiate a more extensive research process involving scientists at other agencies, universities, or research organizations with an interest in these matters. JOS has been very successful as an outlet for these types of authors, and the journal's policy has been to provide them with as much guidance as possible, perhaps more than what is expected by scientific journals.

JOS is published four times a year. All issues from the start are accessible on JOS's Web site, which is searchable. All access is free of charge, all articles can be downloaded with no windows in place; that is, as soon as an issue has been printed it is available on the Internet. The Web site also contains information about subscription rates.