Page 76 - Spring2020

Committee on Publication Policy
Currently, the Publications Office is a virtual office, with staff spread out across the country.
All issues pertinent to scholarly writing and the publication process are discussed at meetings of the PP. The committee is composed of the chair,1 12 members, the editor in chief, and the ASA president-elect. Because different areas of acoustics have somewhat differing styles for scholarly writing and pre- senting research results, the members are selected from the entire spectrum of the ASA technical committees. The PP meets twice yearly during regularly scheduled ASA meetings. The PP also invites guests, such as the editors of JASA-EL, Acoustics Today, and POMA, as well as representatives from the ASA Publications Office, AIP Publishing, and ASA Stu- dent Council to participate in the discussions. In total, about 25 people with different backgrounds typically participate in the committee meetings, which enables consideration of every topic from various perspectives.
Examples of Recent Topics
The PP has a website (see asapublicationpolicy.org) that pro- vides background information and archives past meetings topics. To clarify the scope of the PP, we present some topics that have been discussed during the past several years.
Ethical Principles
All manuscripts and abstracts submitted to ASA journals must adhere to the ASA Ethical Principles. These principles state, among other things, that research involving human subjects and animals should be done according to an existing governing authority, authorship should be limited to those who actually contributed to a publication, errors in published data should be corrected, and any potential or perceived conflict of interest should be disclosed. The ASA ethical principles were approved by the ASA Executive Council in 2004. Because some parts of the current ethical principles are less detailed than those in other societies and would benefit from clarification, the Pub- lications Office and PP decided recently to update and extend the ASA Ethical Principles. The PP has been working on a draft revision of the ASA Ethical Principles.
Plagiarism and Text Recycling
Another timely topic being discussed by the PP is plagia- rism, including self-plagiarism and text recycling. Plagiarism,
1 Vladimir Ostashev has chaired the Committee on Publication Policy since 2018. Keith Wilson chaired the Committee from 2012 to 2018.
which is a serious form of research misconduct, is facili- tated by modern technology. An example of self-plagiarism would be when an author repeats (or “recycles”) extended portions of their own previous text without proper citation and quotation marks. Such a practice may be regarded as an unethical attempt to receive credit for multiple publications based on the same work or it may violate copyrights of prior publications. The ASA Publications Office employs software, called Similarity Check/iThenticate (see ithenticate.com), that enables automatic detection of most plagiarism and text recycling. The software identifies potential articles of concern and calculates the degree of overlap. The PP is working on recommendations for implementing this software to check new submissions and to advise on best practices for preventing plagiarism and text recycling.
What Is a Prior Publication?
Related to the issue of text recycling, one might ask what constitutes prior publication. This is not a trivial question to answer. There is a consensus that papers in peer-reviewed journals, chapters in books, and books are prior publica- tions. But what about publications such as PhD theses, preprints in arXiv, proposals, reports, and noncopyrighted papers in conference proceedings? Can the text from these publications be partially or fully recycled? (The ASA allows POMA publications, for example, to be revised into publica- tions for JASA.) The PP has been considering this topic. The recommendations will be reflected in updated JASA policy statements and instructions.
Updates from American Institute of Physics Publishing
Most meetings of the PP include an update from AIP Publish- ing, which oversees the publication of ASA journals. These updates are very important because the process of publish- ing ASA journals is a collaborative effort between the ASA Publications Office and AIP Publishing.
Simplifying the Submission Process
Currently, two versions of a manuscript must be submitted to JASA and JASA-EL: one with figures embedded and the other with figures collected at the end. It would, of course, be easier for authors, AEs, and reviewers to deal with only one version of a manuscript with the figures embedded. The PP initiated discussions with AIP Publishing to determine whether a manuscript with figures embedded can be used in production. If implemented, this would make a submission process easier.
76 | Acoustics Today | Spring 2020