Writing an editorial is a (roughly) yearly task that the Editor-in-Chief and the Senior Managing Editor have shared in recent years and has generally proved to be a fairly upbeat exercise. Most things are going well for ASA Publications, and we feel the overall trend is positive.
Last year saw the COVID-19 pandemic diminish in intensity. This has allowed travel and in-person interactions, as our ASA meetings and the resumption of most previous “usual” interactions attest. Our operations have mostly returned to normal, but we will continue to hold our Editorial Board meetings virtually as this change allows more editors to attend. We also have an in-person Editorial Board coffee hour, so editors can meet during ASA meetings.
On the other hand, last year also saw a large increase in international conflicts and tensions, which inevitably decreases interactions across national borders. As ASA Publications are international, such events on the world stage affect us. We thus monitor and respond to them as best we can, generally in alignment with the guidance that our publisher, AIP Publishing, provides.
While we must, and do, keep track of the global picture, we also realize that we “act locally,” where the word locally means for us the world of scholarly publishing. It is that world that this Editorial concentrates on.
Let us first discuss the topic that inevitably gets high priority when discussing journals (whether deservedly or not), the two-year Journal Impact Factor (JIF). When I started as Editor-in-Chief, one of my aims was to eventually push the two-year JIF of The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (JASA) past 2.0. Finally, last year (as announced last June), we achieved success in that goal. Our 2021 JIF rose to 2.482 from our 2020 JIF of 1.840.
When analyzing the factors that may have contributed to the overall JIF increase, one of the very important factors was JASA's Special Issues, particularly ones that dealt with important societal topics and issues. This was unsurprising to us as JASA's Special Issues do well in general, as articles automatically have one-year free access after publication and waived page charges. Special Issues have a focused look at a current topic, among other advantages. Given this, we will continue our emphasis on producing good Special Issues on all the areas that acoustics covers and interacts with. However, given the large impact Special Issues can have on the JIF, we also anticipate that JIF may fluctuate.
Another important metric that continues to do well is JASA's full-text downloads which were ∼2.2 million in 2022. People are reading and referencing our content. There are also many other journal metrics that can be applied to JASA, but rather than going through a long discourse, we ask that you please visit the journal website.1
In speaking of statistics, we will mention a rather interesting observation that was brought up at last fall's AIP Publishing Editors meeting at which AIP Publishing personnel and editors of AIP Publishing and Member Society journals meet twice a year to discuss both general and specific journal matters. During this meeting it was noted that authors who they polled were, rather surprisingly, more interested in the “openness” of an article and its speed through the publication process than in other traditional qualities (such as journal reputation and JIF). Authors want their results to “get out there” quickly and they want them to be seen (which free/open access provides an advantage for). Whether you (or we) agree with this ranking of desirable qualities in a journal, it is what authors are weighing more heavily these days, and we are paying attention to them and looking into how we can improve these qualities. We monitor our turnaround times for all of our journals and try our best to keep things as fast as possible, while maintaining quality and doing all the other things that make all of our journals good ones. Regarding openness, three of the ASA Publications are entirely open/free: JASA Express Letters is a gold open-access journal and Proceeding of Meetings on Acoustics (POMA) and Acoustics Today are both freely available to read online. For JASA, the journal has long had an option for authors to pay for gold open access for their articles and it has Read and Publish agreements with institutions that allow corresponding authors to publish an agreed number of articles open access at no direct cost to the author. In addition, for JASA, we offer as much content as we can, including Special Issues as mentioned above, free access for a limited time.
For JASA and JASA Express Letters, we would like to share that the Information for Contributors for each journal have had recent major updates to reflect some important procedural, style, and policy changes. We have tried to revise the Information for Contributors to make the submission process easier and so that authors can easily find the information they are looking for. We have also added new policies and clarified existing policies as needed. We wanted to especially highlight the following major changes:
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New Name Change Policy for Authors
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Requiring Data Availability Statements
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Requiring Conflicts of Interest Statements
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Requiring Ethics Approval Statements for any research article concerning experiments using animal subjects or human participants
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Guidance on ChatGPT and similar AI-based large language models
For more information on the above, please refer to the JASA Information for Contributors2 or JASA Express Letters Information for Contributors.3 Please note that the Word templates for the journals have been updated and the LaTeX templates will be updated as well. We always welcome any questions or feedback at [email protected] and [email protected].
We also wanted to give an update on JASA Express Letters since it has been about two and a half years since it launched as an independent gold open-access journal, and we are pleased with its progress. JASA Express Letters is now indexed in PubMed and Web of Science. This June JASA Express Letters will receive its first JIF.
We are also pleased to announce that going forward, JASA Express Letters will partner with JASA for joint Special Issues. Authors will have the option to choose which journal they would like to submit to, accepted papers will publish in the selected journal, and there will be a cross-journal online collection of the Special Issue at the websites of both journals. Authors will have the option to choose JASA Express Letters if they need to publish in a gold open-access journal. Special Issue articles published in JASA Express Letters will receive a 25% discount on the article processing charge. We hope joint Special Issues will be an attractive option for our authors and readers. If you are interested, please see our open calls for papers for Special Issues.4
Having discussed our two peer-reviewed journals, let us now turn to our other two signature publications: POMA5 and Acoustics Today.
As of 2022, POMA holds a society-wide student paper competition for POMA submissions based on a presentation or poster from the ASA meeting. Up to five student papers receive an award of $300 (USD) and paper winners are noted on the POMA cover page and their article is promoted in email and social media campaigns. Please listen to interviews with student winners on our Across Acoustics podcast.6 Students, if you are presenting at the upcoming 184th Meeting of the Acoustical Society America in Chicago in May 2023, the paper deadline is 11:59 pm Eastern Standard Time, 11 June 2023, and you can find out more about the competition, including qualifications and how to enter, on the ASA website.7
Also, as has long been our policy, publication in POMA does not constitute prior publication for JASA or JASA Express Letters. As part of the Information for Contributors updates for JASA and JASA Express Letters, we clarified how authors should cite and acknowledge their POMA article.
As one of the earliest signs of spring, the spring 2023 Issue of Acoustics Today has bloomed and you can read these articles on the magazine's website.8 In addition to reading the latest from the magazine, you can peruse the ever-growing AT Collections, which are topical collections of previously published Acoustics Today articles.9 AT Collections are designed for use by anyone interested in learning about particular topics in acoustics. The many collections include topics ranging from acoustic metamaterials to concert hall acoustics to underwater hearing. (And Acoustics Today invites ASA members to suggest new collections—just drop a note to the AT Editor.)
Now in its third year, our Across Acoustics podcast is up to thirty episodes featuring authors' research from our four publications. Our podcast seems to be resonating with listeners and, to date, there have been more than 10,000 downloads of episodes. The interviews with the authors are pitched to a lay listener level and are both informative and entertaining. Please subscribe to Across Acoustics anywhere you listen to podcasts!
A new initiative we would like to announce is Propagations,10 the official publications blog of the Publications Office of the ASA. The blog will act as a repository of the latest happenings from ASA Publications and will feature exciting new research from our publications, call for paper announcements, special meeting-related content, acoustics-themed crosswords, and more!
Another major change to announce is that our publisher AIP Publishing just migrated to Silverchair's content platform. We anticipate that this transition has been smooth for JASA, JASA Express Letters, POMA, and our legacy journals. AIP Publishing has been in touch with researchers with instructions on how to update accounts on the new platform.
Please also be aware of the updated URLs for the journals:
• JASA: https://pubs.aip.org/asa/jasa
• JASA Express Letters: https://pubs.aip.org/asa/jel
• POMA: https://pubs.aip.org/asa/poma
• For legacy journals, visit https://pubs.aip.org/asa
We will conclude here by noting that there are also several other good things going on “under the hood” for ASA Publications, but have not yet reached conclusion, so we will have to save them for another day. Until then, we will wish everyone the best and hope to see you reading, listening to, and using ASA's great Publications!
