Page 79 - Summer2020

A Perspective on
Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics
Kent L. Gee, Megan S. Ballard, and Helen Wall Murray
Figure 1. Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics (POMA) submissions from 2016 to March 2020 according to area. Note that computational acoustics wasn't added as an official technical area until 2017.
A relatively recent addition to the rich publishing history of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA) is Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics (POMA). OK, not that recent because POMA has now been around for more than a decade. Introduced in 2007, the electronic, open-access journal exists to enable authors to publish and archive the research shared in talks and poster sessions at semiannual ASA meetings and its other cosponsored conferences and workshops. In this article, we briefly describe POMA as a publication along with its evolution, global growth, and future outlook. More importantly, we discuss how POMA can help accomplish the larger purposes of the ASA. In doing so, we hope readers will see how POMA can help them to more quickly, easily, and broadly disseminate their work.
What Is Proceedings of Meetings
on Acoustics?
POMA is an editor-reviewed, online proceedings journal. Each ASA meeting or cosponsored conference comprises a POMA volume. As of the Chicago (IL) ASA meeting, there are 40 volumes, beginning with Volume 1 for the 2007 Salt Lake City (UT) meeting. To date, more than 3,500 articles have been published.
In principle, any paper that has been presented at an ASA meeting or at a cosponsored conference with an assigned volume may be published in POMA. Figure 1
shows submissions from 2016 to March 1, 2020 by area. Although some areas have more submissions (Physical Acoustics is bolstered by the 2018 International Sympo-
sium on Nonlinear Acoustics) and other areas have fewer,
©2020 Acoustical Society of America. All rights reserved.
https://doi.org/10.1121/AT.2020.16.2.79
POMA receives a growing number of submissions across all areas of acoustics.
As mentioned before, manuscripts are editor reviewed. What does this mean? It means that the assigned
associate editor will review each manuscript for both cor- rectness and clarity. Although the eventual acceptance rate of POMA is above 90%, manuscripts are frequently returned to authors for minor revisions. The review is not intended to rise to the level of a review for The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (JASA) or JASA Express Letters (JASA-EL) but is intended to provide a standard of quality that balances the scope of a conference proceed- ings with the fact that each published article bears the
ASA logo and copyright.
Evolution of Proceedings of Meetings
on Acoustics
Since its inception, POMA has evolved. Early articles varied substantially in terms of format, style, and length. Today, the articles in the journal have a much more uni- form look thanks to manuscript templates that have been well-received by authors (Figure 2). In fact, because of its simplified process and flexibility, POMA has proven to be an ideal platform for transitioning and moving forward publishing initiatives across other Society journals; it was the first of the ASA journals to transition to the new manuscript submission platform Editorial Manager, first
Volume 16, issue 2 | Summer 2020 • Acoustics Today 79