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be published in a peer-reviewed journal (and some that will because POMA is not considered prepublication for JASA). These are all useful functions, and I believe our current pub- lications reasonably span the needs of the community.
However, although we may be reasonably good at provid- ing venues in which to publish, I think we can make some further advances in what and how we publish, which I get to next.
Our publications have (at least) four major functions: (1) to archive results, (2) to communicate and discuss new things in acoustics, (3) to educate and inform, and (4) to promote the ASA and acoustics in general. Often, people just think of the first function as being the “mission” of peer-reviewed journals, with magazines (like our AT) taking care of the lat- ter three functions. But this is a very narrow view of journals. JASA, our flagship journal, has reviews, tutorials, letters, and forums all available for communicating and educat- ing, although these are not as widely used as they could be. I would like to increase that usage. We also have the capacity for special issues, collections, and invited articles, which are generally appealing to the journal’s readership. Moreover, our publications have the latitude to “think outside the box” of the ASA technical specialties, as defined by its techni- cal committee structure. Acoustics has a very broad reach, and it would be good to think of all things acoustic as being within our purview. This might also help us attract new areas of interest and new people to the ASA. I’m not advocating that we ignore our core areas or strengths but rather that we should consider making some routine forays beyond them.
Another first-order consideration for our publications is quality. Just how good are we, really? Well, looking at JASA, we are the largest acoustics journal in the world and the most cited – those are certainly a start. We are also healthy finan- cially, have a very good publications staff, and have an excel- lent, global reputation. These are also good signs. However, by one indicator that is widely used, impact factor (IF), we are decidedly average and need improvement. JASA’s IF has hovered between 1.5 and 1.7 in recent years, and I feel that it should be at least above 2.0 for an acoustics journal. (We are a smaller society and technical field than some, so we won’t ever have huge IF numbers, which depend on having a large number of people writing and citing papers.)
It is well known that IF can be “gamed,” with some of the games being ethical and others being rather unethical. For instance, giving free “downloads” of your journal’s papers or
“... we’re good, but we can be, and need to be, better to survive and flourish.”
other small perks to authors and/or hard-working review- ers is keeping with standard business practice incentives. I’d actually like to see ASA explore and implement such ethical incentives for participation in our publications’ activities. In the main, my approach to improving IF will be through the “old school” ways: (1) maintaining high technical qual- ity; (2) ensuring speedier publication; (3) retaining excellent editors, associate editors, and staff; and (4) making a con- certed effort to attract authors to submit their most novel and important material. These will ensure quality, of which IF is only one metric.
A complaint that has often been made about JASA is that the publication process is just too slow. I won’t disagree. So how do we fix this important piece of the process? The me- thodical, and I believe correct, way of doing this is to gather data (time-in-process statistics) on all the various steps in the publication process, look for the bottlenecks, and then work to eliminate them. These steps include quality control, associate editor assignment, reviewer assignment, time in review, associate editor decision time, author revision time, and time to publication of an accepted manuscript. I’m sure improvements can be made in all phases, but some will be more critical to improve than others. We are hoping to have a full statistical study of the publication chain done by the next ASA meeting in the fall, and we will be implementing further improvements to the system even before then.
I note that we already have taken some steps to speed up the process. We have been pursuing the completion of very tardy (for whatever reason) manuscript files, streamlining and simplifying the initial quality control step, and imple- menting e-first, all of which will reduce delays. We also will have automatic queueing of reviewers when we implement the Editorial Manager (EM) peer-review system (planned for late August, 2015), which will speed up the reviewer as- signment process.
Another big topic for journals nowadays is open access. I’m happy to say that JASA now has a “gold” open-access option, which is advertised and described in detail on the ASA Web site. (JASA-EL, POMA, and AT are already fully open ac- cess.) I am very supportive of open access because the more people who can access our content, the better. I will try to make as much of JASA’s content open access as I can within the constraints of our current “hybrid” financial model (i.e., part open access, part subscription).
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