It has been my custom as Editor in Chief to write a yearly editorial, along with our Senior Managing Editor Liz Bury, that is both a retrospective of last year and also a look forward at the plans for the coming year. It is a good format, and we will again adhere to it. This editorial mainly focuses on the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (JASA) but will also touch on our other ASA Publications.
In describing 2020, our interactions with our readers, authors, reviewers, editors, staff, publisher, vendors, and anyone else during the deadly COVID-19 pandemic must absolutely dominate the narrative. As mentioned in an April 2020 Editorial,1 written a few weeks after the pandemic hit the Northeastern USA where our Publications Staff is concentrated, we have been fortunate in that our operations were not significantly disrupted. This is due to the fact that our staff largely worked remotely long before the pandemic. Publishing is an industry that lends itself well to electronic communications, and so we continue operations with minimal disruption.
Of course, due to the pandemic, some adjustments had to be made (and are still being made when necessary) for time considerations for authors, reviewers, and Associate Editors as noted in the April 2020 Editorial.1 Also, our Spring and Fall Editorial Board meetings, which are usually in-person, had to be moved to virtual. Both meetings went fairly well over video conferencing, and there even was increased attendance due to the (now well known) effect of people not having to travel long distances, with the attendant expense of money and time.
Before delving into journal metrics, let us mention one more pandemic related item, specifically the Special Issue on COVID-19 Pandemic Acoustic Effects. The global coronavirus pandemic is a terrible, but thankfully relatively rare, event. As acoustics interacts with the pandemic in a variety of ways, we need to avail ourselves, as a scientific and technical community, of the opportunity to study and document it for the benefit of present and future understanding and applications. Thus, we inaugurated this JASA Special Issue, and the call for papers2 will remain in effect until somewhat after the pandemic has abated (in order to enable publishing of post-pandemic transition studies).
While speaking of JASA Special Issues, they continue to be very popular and in 2020 we published three Special Issues in addition to publishing articles for open Special Issues. Please see our collection page for a complete list of JASA Special Issues and open calls for papers.3
Turning now to metrics of JASA's performance, we are happy to first report that we kept our service to authors at a good level. Our average number of days from submission to first decision was down to 52 days in 2020, a 17% improvement since 2017. Thanks to the dedication of our reviewers, Coordinating and Associate Editors, and our Publications Staff, we were still able to improve on speed in 2020 in spite of the pandemic.
Moving on to standard journal quality metrics, our two-year 2019 Impact Factor (IF) is 1.780 (2018 IF 1.819) and our five-year 2019 IF 1.908 (2018 IF 1.902), which is relatively stable compared with the previous year. The Immediacy Index, which “indicates how quickly articles in a journal are cited,”4 has been increasing since 2015 and is 0.517 for 2019. The 2019 Cited Half Life stayed constant at 16.3 years. JASA articles continue to be cited for a long time!
Other useful metrics are abstract views and full-text downloads. Not all of JASA's readers are academics who write and cite papers, so these are perhaps even more general usage statistics. Due to a variety of factors, including our improved marketing efforts, our total abstract views have gone from ∼2,100,000 in 2016 to ∼5,300,000 in 2020 and total full-text downloads have gone from ∼1,200,000 in 2016 to ∼2,000,000 in 2020. We are happy to report that more people are looking at and reading our content.
In 2020, we also had some exciting developments and happenings. One big change was in our Publications staff. We welcomed Ms. Malené Walters as our new Publications Business Manager in March 2020. Malené has been a great addition to the Publications team and she has greatly improved our business operations.
Another very big change was the transitioning of JASA Express Letters from a special section of JASA into a fully independent gold open-access journal, which formally transitioned as of January 1, 2021, but which needed over a year of detailed preparation. We'd like to specially thank JASA Express Letters Editor Dr. Charles C. Church, Associate Editors, ASA Headquarters and Publications Staff, and AIP Publishing Staff for making the transition as smooth as possible! Please be sure to read Charlie's editorial on the transition, which will appear in the February 2021 issue of the new JASA Express Letters.
While JASA Express Letters is no longer part of JASA, please note that JASA will be keeping its Letter to the Editors article type. Letters to the Editors serve two purposes: for shorter research contributions and for comments on previously published JASA papers. Letters are submitted through JASA's online submission system and you can learn more via JASA's Instructions for Contributors.5
Also of note in 2020 was the inauguration in July6 of our new JASA Reflections feature, which highlights seminal, historical JASA papers in acoustics. This feature has been well received, and plans are to continue it through 2029, when all the articles published will then be gathered into a 100th ASA anniversary collection. Reflections articles (and the classic paper it highlights) are made freely available for a full year from publication.
A new event, which was matched to the virtual world that we currently find ourselves enmeshed in, was our Meet the ASA Publications Editors and Staff Virtual Event held on October 16, 2020. We feel strongly that our operation should be both transparent and user-friendly and this hour-long event allowed anyone interested to learn more and connect with the Editors and Staff of our publications. The event was recorded, and the video is available on the ASA's YouTube channel.7 We're strongly considering doing more virtual events in future.
The final piece of news is the development of our new ASA Publications podcast series, Across Acoustics, which features interviews with our authors describing their recently published work. The podcast launched in January 20218 and we hope that this additional exposure of authors' work will prove beneficial to both them and the community.
In closing, we also want to mention ASA Publications' two other major publications, the Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics (POMA) and Acoustics Today (AT). In the Spring of 2020, Dr. Megan S. Ballard took over as POMA Editor and is leading the journal in exciting new directions. POMA has a video/YouTube campaign in development, and the first video was an introduction to the new Editor.9 Please note that POMA's rolling submission policy invites corresponding manuscripts from all past ASA meetings. If you have presented at any ASA Meeting, it is not too late to submit your POMA paper! And, lest we forget, many, many thanks go to former POMA Editor Dr. Kent L. Gee for his many years of devoted service and for the numerous improvements he made to POMA over those years.
AT has continued to flourish under AT Editor Dr. Arthur N. Popper's capable direction. In 2020 AT underwent a redesign, which launched in the AT Summer 2020 issue and won Gold in the Hermes Creative Awards.10 In May/June 2020, an AT reader survey went out to ASA members and we received great feedback. For more on the survey results, please read Editorial Associate Kat Setzer's article.11 Finally, AT published a Special Issue in Spring 2020 to celebrate the International Year of Sound.12
We would also like to take a moment to thank the very talented ASA Publications Staff, who, in spite of the challenges of 2020, have worked diligently and creatively to keep ASA Publications running smoothly and successfully in 2020 and will continue to do exemplarily work in 2021.
As a final note, we wish all of you a safe, happy, and healthy new year in 2021, and for many years beyond that!
