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our Editorial Board Luncheon and Business Meeting for JASA, JASA-EL, and POMA at each ASA meeting. Once a month, AIPP and the ASA publications office have a conference call to work on ongoing projects and concerns. Also monthly, the ASA Strategic Plan Task Force 3 subgroup (focused on publi- cations strategy) has a conference call. On a (roughly) biyearly basis, our peer-review system provider, Aries Systems, gives webinars to our associate editors to teach new editors and up- date all editors on the Editorial Manager peer-review system. And once a year, Aries Systems has an Editorial Manager User Group (EMUG) meeting in Boston that is usually attended by a few members of the publications staff, where all the latest is- sues of peer review and workflow are discussed. Twice a year, AIPP hosts it’s “Panel of Editors” meeting, where the broad aspects of the publications world are discussed as well as the finer details of publishing with AIPP.
Perhaps a bit more exciting, on March 15, 2018, a day-long “ASA Publications Summit” was held, which was a large- scale review of all of the ASA publications. Large reviews like this are infrequent, but when they happen, they are enormously helpful. Both ASA and AIPP personnel took part (see Figure 1) and developed a large list of action items and ideas to help stimulate the growth and quality of all of the ASA publications.
This may seem like a large number of meetings overall, but these mostly mundane, workaday affairs are absolutely nec- essary if one wants to stay abreast in the publications world or even get a little ahead of the game!
Concluding Remarks and Thoughts Toward the Future
If you have had the tenacity to read this far, you will perhaps agree that evaluating and continually improving journal quality is a very multifaceted topic. Publishing journals like JASA and JASA-EL takes constant attention to detail, good team work, extensive communications, and overall devo- tion. ASA publications is fortunate to have a very good staff, publisher, peer-review system, editorial board (AE) staff, and vendors as well as a Society that cares deeply about its publications. All these components work to provide our au- thors and readers a high-quality venue in which to publish their work and read that of their colleagues.
Finally, as we promised to discuss, where do we envision being in 1, 5, and 10 years from now, assuming that the Fates are kind?
The one-year prediction is the easiest, of course. Given the inputs from the Publication Summit, the KWF Consulting survey (Hager and Rivera, 2018), AIPP’s inputs, our internal statistics studies, and so on, our list of important things to do is long. It will easily take us a few years to accomplish the main items on this list. But the near-future roadmap is there and has been thoughtfully worked out, and our immediate future lies in following it.
As to the five-year mark, it is more appropriate to talk about expectations than about concrete plans. In 2023, we would hope to see both JASA and JASA-EL enjoy a higher IF and a higher rate of submissions and contain more special content features and articles. Also by this time, the paper and CD versions of JASA might be phased out, although that is not certain. And, of course, our speed and quality initiatives will continue to be pursued and improved.
In 2028, the year before the 100th birthday of the ASA, we fully expect a huge flurry of activity in looking at what the ASA and its publications have accomplished. And although this certainly will have a strong retrospective component, we hope there will be a strong forward-looking one as well. The ASA and its publications have historically had, and will have in the future, a large role to play in the universe of sound.
Acknowledgments
We want to make sure that everyone who is employed, either full time or part time, by ASA publications gets acknowl- edged! Between the editors and the publications personnel shown in Figure 1, most of us have been mentioned. We also thank and acknowledge Saana McDaniel, manuscript man- ager of JASA-EL, Elaine Moran in the Melville main office, and Helen Popper, copyeditor for AT.
References
Boston College Libraries. (2018). Assessing Journal Quality: Journal Quality. Available at https://libguides.bc.edu/journalqual.
Hager, A., and Rivera, C. (2018). JASA Reader and Author Survey Report. KWF Consulting, Baltimore, MD.
Lynch, J. F., and Lee, K. C. (2017) The Need for Speed. Acoustics Today 13(2), 52-55. Available at http://acousticstoday.org/needforspeed.
Nature Editorial (2016). Time to Remodel the Journal Impact Factor. Avail- able at http://acousticstoday.org/remodelIF.
van Nierop, E. (2009). Why do statistics journals have low impact fac- tors? Statistica Neerlandica 63 (1), 52–62. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467- 9574.2008.00408.x.
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