Peter Green has been elected Chair of the Biometrika Trust, and took office on 1 December 2023
Biometrika is one of the leading statistics journals in the world, and over the decades its pages have publishedmany of the seminal works of our discipline. It was founded in 1901 by Karl Pearson, Francis Galton and Raphael Weldon, and as its name suggests originally focused on biometrics, including, very regrettably, papers on eugenics. Since the 1930’s its remit has been statistics theory and methodology, and since 1935 it has been owned and published by a charity, the Biometrika Trust. Previous chairs of the trust include Leonard Tippett, Jim Durbin, David Cox and John Kingman.
Almost all journals are owned either by learned societies or commercial publishers; both Biometrika’s charitable status and lack of a membership give it certain advantages, but also impose constraints. The Trust is not involved with editorial decisions, of course, but with appointments, finance and strategy – issues of current concern include managing the evolution to open access publishing, establishing a policy on the use of AI in authorship and peer review, and setting up a small grants scheme to support research in statistical science.
