Editorial—A brief journal status update Free

It has now been about a year and a half since I took over as Editor-in-Chief (EIC) of the publications of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA), which includes the editorship of the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (JASA). Since the EIC of ASA Publications is appointed for 3 year, renewable terms, it is perhaps appropriate to call this Editorial my “Mid Term Report” to you, the readers.

Much has happened in the year and a half since our former EIC, Allan Pierce, stepped down after 15 years of distinguished service to the Journal. I would like to take this opportunity to bring you up to date on those events, and also let you see into some of the inner workings of JASA and our Express Letters journal (JASA-EL). Our ASA magazine Acoustics Today (AT), and our Proceedings on Meetings in Acoustics (POMA), are published separately, so I will not stress them here. By and large these events have been positive ones, and I am personally encouraged by our flagship Journal's prospects and the prospects of our Express Letters Journal going into the future.

The most noticeable change to both JASA and JASA-EL is not noticeable to the reader, but is very evident from the point of view of our authors, reviewers, Associate Editors, and manuscript coordinators. Specifically, JASA and JASA-EL have transitioned from the PeerXpress (PXP) peer review system to the Editorial Manager (EM) peer review system, with the formal handoff occurring on September 15, 2015. This was not done out of dissatisfaction with PXP, but rather our perception that the EM system would give us more hands-on control of the system, as well as some new options that I will discuss later. Our publisher is still American Institute of Physics Publishing, LLC (AIPP), and that will not change.

Our initial transition to using the EM software actually occurred for POMA in mid-December, 2014. This was envisioned as the least complicated transition, with fewer consequences if disruption occurred, and so it was used as a test before we attempted to “go-live” with JASA and JASA-EL. It turned out that this was a good decision, in that the transition was not as smooth as expected, and it taught us some valuable lessons. We slowed our schedule, and took our time testing and re-testing the system until Aries Systems (our vendor for EM), the ASA Publications Office, and AIPP were in agreement that both the JASA and JASA-EL systems worked well enough to go live on EM. However, no matter how carefully one tests “dummy manuscript” submissions, there are still possibilities that are hard to anticipate. In terms of the submission, manuscript handling, editing, peer-review, and production hand-off processes, there is no substitute for working with live manuscripts. We have just completed our first round of submissions using EM.

Not unexpectedly, we encountered some problems during the first round of live submissions. Addressing these problems was the first priority of our Journal staff, as the continuity of Journal operations is essential. Weekly staff meetings and numerous conversations with both Aries Systems and AIPP allowed us to address both the procedural and configurational problems we encountered. Just as important, high priority was assigned to dealing with the individual problems that were reported by our authors, reviewers, and Associate Editors. We tried to not only address these as individual problems, but also to quickly make changes to the system when a problem was indicated to be a wider systemic one. I might note that perhaps the biggest problem we encountered was that people were unfamiliar with the new EM system, and either did not know how to use its features appropriately, or assumed that it was exactly the same as the old system. That indicated to us that we need to do a better job of communicating that things have changed, and exactly how they have changed. I would also note that we have tried, and will continue to try, to expedite any papers that were delayed at some point due to these system transition (or other) issues, and make up any lost time in process. We thank our stakeholders (the authors, reviewers, Editors, and so on) for their patience with us during this initial period. The first round of submitted papers has now gone through the full peer review and production process using the EM software, and we expect things to go more smoothly from this point on.

Such a transition period is also a good time to do new things, and to implement new features into our Journals, and over the past year and a half we have done just that, with more to come. Some of the features we have implemented so far (which are not new to publishing, by the way, and perhaps were overdue!) are “Gold” open access, Publish-Ahead-of-Print (PAP), Multimedia files (both video and sound) in JASA, restarting supplementary material file archiving in JASA, and a major change of our quality control process upon submission. Perhaps a few details about these are worth relating.

A notable feature that authors and readers alike tend to look for in journals today is open/free access material. While JASA-EL has been fully open access from its inception, only selected articles in JASA were available for free access, and JASA lacked an open access option for its authors to select. That was remedied last summer (2015), when JASA implemented the “Gold” open access option for authors. Using this option, the author pays a flat fee of $2200 for publication (set at the publication industry average); the article is then archived within the Journal and is free from the date of publication for public access. This option seems to be increasingly popular with authors. (Of course our Journals also respect the usual government and university mandates for access and archiving of material, as well.)

The second feature that we have had implemented is Publish Ahead of Print, or PAP. With this feature, an article is posted electronically with its distinct doi (digital object identifier) within a day or two of the author-corrected galley proofs being received by the publisher, AIPP, which increases the timeliness of the paper's publication. There is a small downside to PAP, in that the pagination of the printed Journal is not linear, but rather in the order that the articles are received and published. (The articles are still sorted topically, however.) The quick posting of papers electronically, which has now become the dominant medium for dissemination, outweighs this problem.

A third feature of note is that multimedia is now available in JASA. JASA-EL has always accommodated multimedia, but JASA did not. Given the nature of modern media, this shortcoming was no longer acceptable, and so this capability was implemented for JASA last summer. I would note to authors who want to include multimedia files with their submission how important it is that the file names we ask you to use are correct, which will avoid delays in processing. The increased capability comes with the restriction of imposing a bit more caution with the (increased number of) file names.

Starting last fall, we have allowed JASA authors to again publish supplementary material along with their manuscripts. As with the multimedia material, this comes with a notice to our authors to be careful with the file names to avoid unnecessary delays. The allowable file names are clearly stated in the manuscript submission instructions.

The next item is a major change in how we execute our quality control process. Specifically, we have drastically reduced the requirements for initial submission of a manuscript, and only require that the manuscript is adequate for review. If a manuscript is accepted, then a more stringent set of requirements is applied for production and publication. This is a rather common sense approach that was requested by our authors, and it was implemented in steps, with our largest changes implemented around March of this year.

Finally, I should mention that the billing for JASA and JASA-EL is now done through the Copyright Clearance Center's RightsLink service, which should cut down on the time lost due to the less efficient billing system we used previously.

I would like to report one more very welcome “new feature” (well, to be more precise, new person!) that will be added to JASA and JASA-EL soon. Specifically, the Publications Office in West Barnstable, MA, will be adding a new, and very experienced, Managing Editor, Ms. Elizabeth Bury. Elizabeth (“Liz”) Bury will start on May 2, and promises to be a valuable addition to an already excellent publications team. (Let me divert for a second to acknowledge that team as well: Mary Guillemette, Kelly Quigley, Helen Wall Murray, Saana McDaniel, Art Popper, Kent Gee, and Charlie Church.) An extended write-up about Liz may be found on ASA's Scitation webpage at www.acousticalsociety.org. Having a Managing Editor should help increase our timeliness, improve our publication processes, and provide some needed backup for our current staff when they must be away from their desks.

Though we already had made a number of plans for the future within the Publications Office, the society-wide Strategic Plan exercise gave us a further, and very strong, impetus towards organizing and crystallizing those plans. The overall Strategic Plan dealt with the entire Acoustical Society, and one can find details about it on ASA's website, www.acousticalsociety.org. I will focus here on the part that dealt with our publications, and leave the reader to look at the web site if he or she wishes to see the whole plan.

The publications part of the Strategic Plan is called “Dissemination of Information and Knowledge,” and has as its objective to “streamline and upgrade author, reader, editor, and reviewer experience in all publication processes.” Those are the lofty objectives, but the practical meat of the matter is found in the five specific tasks that were identified under those objectives, which are complete with personnel assignments, timelines, and metrics for success. These tasks are (1) updating our templates (Word and LaTex, for JASA, JASA-EL, and POMA), (2) insuring our keyword search list is current and complete, (3) promoting our publications, (4) updating and completing documentation for authors, reviewers, editors, and readers, and (5) speeding up our time to publication. All these tasks have a very detailed set of sub-tasks. We have been having monthly phone conferences with our working groups to both formulate and implement our specific ideas.

I will not bore you with all the details, as there are many. However, examining one or two specific examples might be useful to give you some flavor of what we are doing. Picking the “templates” task, we found that the LaTex submissions most needed to have this feature available. However, the JASA template that previously existed was outdated and often unusable. Simple attempts to fix it resulted in enough errors that we decided to have both an AIPP contractor and an in-house programmer work to fix this, and moreover, we made it a priority item. We are thus hoping to have the new LaTex template in place in 1 to 2 months. A second example worth examining is “speeding up the time to publication.” At first, we concentrated on the processes that we control in-house, which we have identified as needing improvement, such as assigning an Associate Editor to a manuscript. In this particular case, the simplest and quickest thing we can do is to revise the assignment process itself and monitor it more closely, which is now possible, given the added manpower of a new Managing Editor. Even for these two simple examples, we have left out much of the details but hopefully you can see the sorts of things we are considering and how we carefully prioritize them.

There are many other parts to our publication portion of the Strategic Plan, but space forbids me from discussing them all. I would rather just leave this topic saying that there has been significant progress overall. Our timeline has most of our proposed tasks due for completion by the end of this year, and we are working hard towards achieving that goal.

While our JASA and JASA-EL “regular submissions” are the mainstay of the Journal, we are also now pursuing submissions in some article types that have either lagged in recent years, or, in fact, are somewhat new. These article types are: Special Issue Articles, Forum Articles, Tutorial Articles, Review Articles, and Guest Invited Articles.

The contents of the article types themselves are described easily enough. Special Issues are topical collections of articles that are gathered either from a general “Call for Papers” that is posted on the ASA website, or privately by invitation. Review papers are high level overviews of a specific technical area, usually submitted by more senior, experienced researchers and practitioners. Tutorials are educational pieces that are intended for students or professional people who are new to a given technical area. Our Guest Invited papers are designed to attract both highly regarded authors from within the ASA community, as well as acoustic researchers from outside the usual Society topical borders. The Forum papers are meant to be discussion pieces that can focus on a wider variety of topics, such as anecdotes or historical items, or can advocate opinions or actions. The latter are meant for a technical journal audience, as opposed to the popular writing of Acoustics Today.

The articles that were just discussed are attractive for a few reasons. First, they are all (with one exception) free to the author (except for color in print) and are immediately made open/free access. Special Issue articles are open access at a deeply discounted price, or after 6 months if the authors do not wish to pay for immediate open access. These articles are also highly cited. Reviews and Tutorials are very popular with students, and Special Issues are welcome to researchers in a given area, as they are a concentrated source for good papers. The intent behind all of these categories, when added to our usual article roster, is to give authors and readers a broad and inclusive spectrum of literature to consider.

I should mention that these are all “Invited by the Editor” articles; they require approval by the EIC of the Journal (for JASA-EL, this would just include the Special Issue Category, as JASA-EL has only regular or special issue submissions available). We encourage people to recommend such articles or collections of articles to the EIC, but we do not process unsolicited manuscripts. We want to see both high quality and a fair distribution of such articles across our Society disciplines, so editorial office review is a necessary first step. If you have suggestions, contact either Jim Lynch at [email protected] or Charlie Church at [email protected]. It should be noted that one of the attractions of the new peer review system is that it has a rather well developed set of tools for formally inviting and tracking such material.

Open access, wherein one can freely obtain an article without having a subscription or being part of a library subscription, is an increasingly attractive and common option. At present, JASA is a hybrid journal, which has a mixture of subscription material and open access papers. (JASA-EL, on the other hand, has always been open access.)

Our aim with JASA is to become as much of an open access journal as we can, given the finances of ASA. As mentioned, we now have the “Gold” open access option available for all article types, and as discussed above, many article types are already free to the author and open access. (This also includes our Acoustical News, our Acoustical Standards News, and our Reviews of Acoustical Patents.) We additionally plan to make a significant amount of our previous content freely accessible in the near future, hopefully within a year. This list will include: (1) “Important Papers” collections, right now planned as monthly and chosen by the ASA Technical Committees, (2) the recently released “What have your peers been reading?” list of most read papers that was distributed via AIPP, which opened that list for free downloads, (3) all the past material in Reviews, Tutorials, Special Issues, and Invited Articles that has not been made open. We need some time to implement all of this, as well as some publicity so that you know it is happening and where to find this material, but it will happen, again hopefully within a 1 year timeframe.

Nowadays, there are an abundance of statistical analyses of journal performance: impact factor, immediacy, shelf life, and so on. Each of these is targeted to a particular aspect of a journal's performance, but it takes a well-considered (and usually journal-specific) weighted average of such indicators to describe how well a journal performs, both to the satisfaction of those who produce the journal and to the readership of the journal. And no matter how many statistics you quote, there is still some subjectivity left. This is not to downplay the usefulness of such analyses, but to point out that they have limits.

That being said, what about our JASA statistics? Well, to paraphrase what I said in a November 2015 Acoustics Today article that I wrote when I first became Editor: “for the world's largest and most widely read acoustics journal, they are decidedly average.” JASA and JASA-EL have worldwide reputations and are a leading “brand,” but our statistical indicators are not quite as good as we would like them to be. Given that these statistics are widely quoted and used, what do we do about this?

I think that the greatest value of such statistics to the Publications Office is that they tell us where to look to improve things. My “short form” analysis of where this takes us for JASA centers on three areas: (1) quality, (2) timeliness/customer service, and (3) accessibility and visibility. Let me discuss these each separately.

Quality is a “no compromise” issue for JASA, and one where I think we do very well. But insuring quality does not just consist of “rejecting poor papers”—a journal also must attract the best papers and authors. That is where I see the Journal being more pro-active in being a magnet for quality papers. I do not think any journal can rest on its reputation these days, and I am looking into strategies (e.g., our Invited Papers and other categories) to solicit more of the best quality authors and material. We already get very good papers submitted. We want more.

Timeliness in the “submission to first decision” stages of the peer review process is one of the particularly sensitive areas for a journal's reputation, and honestly this is one area where we have not done as well as we need to. We would like to be in the 60 day range for this, but often we see papers at 90 days or more. This is a part of “timeliness” where we can see making significant advances by improving our processes. This is also one area where the addition of our new Managing Editor should make a substantial difference, in that a big part of a Managing Editor's job is to insure that the peer review process works smoothly and in a timely manner.

Customer service may not seem to be an immediate fit with the timeliness factor, but in my opinion, it is linked. Despite everyone's best efforts and intentions, glitches happen during the peer review process, and the worst thing that can be done in such cases is to ignore the problem. As we all know, a problem will not go away by itself. And sometimes these problems (which can be due to Editors, manuscript handlers, reviewers, production, and even authors) take some time to remedy. In such cases, prompt and courteous communications with the affected parties can both help solve the problem, and also allay fears (usually by the authors) that their paper has been “lost in process.” Our goal is to be sensitive to such issues as part of the review process, and we try to respond to any concerns expressed within 1 to 2 working days. We aim to provide even more prompt and courteous service to you, our stakeholders, in the future.

The final notes I will sound (appropriate for an acoustics journal) are accessibility and visibility. Obviously one cannot use a journal article, or cite it, if one does not know about it. It has to be well advertised and easily searchable. Both of these areas, which again we are working on via specific objectives and tasks outlined in the Strategic Plan, can and will be improved. And even if one knows about an article, accessibility is a factor. That is where, especially for those without access to a subscription, open access becomes increasingly important. Open access articles are more widely read and cited, so by making more and more material open, we expect our Journal articles will be more widely read, shared, downloaded, and cited.

There is much more I could say, about JASA and JASA-EL and their affairs, especially in this time of transition. But perhaps that is best left for the next Editorial, when I will be able to tell you about how the plans and happenings I have discussed today have turned out, and what our new plans are. I hope to have many good things report! Until then, I thank you for taking the time to read this, and I send you my best regards!