The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (JASA) has been publishing continuously since 1929 and this year we will reach a pivotal milestone of 90 years of publication of the journal. We want to take a moment to thank all who have contributed to the success of JASA over the years—ASA members, authors, reviewers, editors, readers and subscribers, ASA staff, and our publisher, the AIP Publishing (AIPP), and the AIPP staff.
Before getting to some of the more detailed news, we are happy to report that JASA, and its special section JASA Express Letters (JASA-EL), have made significant strides over the past year. This is due in most part to our excellent staff, which is now up to full strength with the movement of Kat Setzer from part time to full time.
In 2019, we plan to continue our progress on our speed in review and publication (Lynch and Lee, 2017). In 2018, we exceeded our goal of average time from submission to first decision for JASA at 54 days (goal: 60 days or fewer), and we got closer to our goal for average time from submission to accept decision at 126 days (goal: 120 days or fewer). For JASA-EL, we have made progress and are still working on our speed goals: in 2018, average time from submission to first decision was 44.6 days (goal: 35–40 days) and average time from submission to acceptance was 81 days (goal: 75 days). There is still room for improvement, and we keep checking our processes to see where gains can be made to continue to meet and exceed our goals for both JASA and JASA-EL.
We will also be continuing our quality strategy goals, as outlined in Lynch et al. (2018). One of our goals has been to focus on strategies to legitimately increase Impact Factor (IF), such as inviting high-impact special content and further improving marketing and promotion of articles. Our 2017 IF had risen to 1.605 and is predicted by AIPP to go up even more this year. JASA's IF had been flat for a number of years, but that trend is changing, and our trajectory is now upward. Our goal remains to push past 2.0 in the near future. We should note that JASA was #1 in citations among Web of Science acoustics journals in 2017 (44,946 total cites), and also had the highest eigenfactor score (a measure of a journal's total importance to the scientific community) at 0.02701. In addition, JASA is highly read with an average of 527 downloads per article in 2017 (1.4 million total). And looking at longer term statistics, JASA's half-life for citations exceeds ten years, and our five year IF was 1.845 in 2017. These are good statistics overall, and again, we are making a focused, conscious effort to have all of our statistics firmly in the excellent category.
Our number of Special Issues, as well as other special content articles, is at the highest level ever, and these articles are very popular with authors and readers alike. To see JASA's open call for papers and forthcoming Special Issues, visit our Special Issues collection page.1 Because our Special Issues have become so popular and we have so many forthcoming issues, we will need to start restricting the free access period for most Special Issues to one year after publication (with grandfathering of free access for currently open older issues to the end of 2019). This is due to our hybrid journal nature. We do a lot of marketing and advertising of these issues in the first year and beyond, and they will still be among our most visible special content.
There are several other new developments on our 2019 roadmap. As a continuation of the JASA redesign (Lynch 2018), we will be recasting the overall look of the published article templates to add clear journal branding later in 2019. We invariably have heard positive feedback on JASA's “new look” and this is one of the final steps. Also, as tends to happen as computer technology quickly evolves, components become obsolete. Because CD-ROMs are now one of those technologies and the whole wealth of JASA content from 1929 onward is available online at the journal website,2 ASA has decided to discontinue the JASA CD at the end of 2019. Additionally, this year we will be updating the JASA and JASA-EL LaTeX templates for submission. LaTeX is an important publication tool for many of our authors, and we are doing our best to keep this tool current and supported.
Last, but certainly not least, to celebrate JASA's long publication history, we will be launching a new feature this year called JASA Reflections, an effort which has been spearheaded by Diane Kewley-Port. This feature will highlight the seminal historical JASA articles that have had an impact on the science of acoustics and on the world. This feature will lead up to ASA's 100th anniversary in 2029, and our plan is to combine the Reflections articles over the coming decade into a special collection as part of the 2029 centennial celebration.
We will conclude by saying that we're happy to have made progress, but won't rest on our laurels. We are just as excited about making even more progress and improvements so JASA can best serve both the Society and the world, not just in 2019 but for the next 90 years and beyond.
