New Developments in Signal Processing Society Publications

by Mari Ostendorf, Vice President-Publications

This is a time of rapid changes in the publication world, with the opportunities that electronic publishing generates. Taking advantage of these changes, the IEEE Signal Processing Society staff and volunteers are looking for ways to better serve their authors and readers. In addition, the IEEE is also more broadly pursuing innovations in content delivery. I would therefore like to alert you to the advances that are already in place and developments to look for in the future.

Electronic publishing through IEEE Xplore offers the possibility of augmenting papers with multimedia examples—including audio, image, and video files—which provide concrete illustrations of the utility of a new algorithm. I encourage you to take advantage of these opportunities, which are especially relevant to many problems in signal processing and can increase the impact of your work. To make your work more easily reproducible, you are also encouraged to submit code that can be accessed through IEEE Xplore with your paper. IEEE Xplore is also now augmenting the paper presentation with links to related content and citation information, and more developments are in the works to make the presentation more useful to readers.

The Signal Processing Society has moved to an all-electronic version of the Content Gazette, with which you can electronically browse all our journals and click on links that take you straight to the papers that you are interested in. We welcome your suggestions of how to make the Content Gazette even more useful to you.

Electronic publication is also making it possible to reduce the time to move manuscripts from submission to publication, which again contributes to higher impact factors. In 2013, all of the Signal Processing Society journals will move to article based electronic publishing, which allows a more frequent publishing schedule. Compiled print versions will be issued less frequently. We are also working with IEEE to reduce the editing time in general, referring papers to an outside editing service for the small percentage of cases in which more careful editing will be necessary.

Of course, timely reviews and revisions are still key elements to rapid publication! Part of moving papers through the publication process more quickly is timely notification to authors when a paper is not a good fit to the journal. To assist authors and editors, we have updated our guidelines to establish explicit criteria by which papers can be immediately rejected without the full review process. In all such cases, the journal Editor-in-Chief gets input from the Editorial Board members, so there are multiple people considering every submission. By reducing the number of papers sent to full review, we hope to reduce the burden on reviewers and improve the quality of reviews overall.

Of course, one of the major developments right now is open access, which will be playing a larger role in the future of our publications. The IEEE already has in place a policy whereby authors can pay to have their paper available through open access within all our regular journals, but few people have taken advantage of this due to the high cost. Starting this fall, the cost will be lowered to $1750 for a standard-length paper, which is in the range of other high-quality publication venues. You can take advantage of this option in any of our journals. The IEEE is providing other models for open access as well, which the Society is currently examining.

Lastly, we recognize the changing role of conference publications in our society. Conference publications are now easily available through IEEE Xplore, so they can no longer be thought of as “non-archival.” With this development, we need to rethink the relation between journal papers and conference papers, and we have therefore initiated a few changes.

First, we will no longer be accepting technical correspondence papers to our journals. Papers that are well suited to the four-page format should be submitted to the IEEE SIGNAL PROCESSING LETTERS or to one of our conferences.

Second, to encourage you to submit your best short-paper work to the IEEE SIGNAL PROCESSING LETTERS, we have instituted an agreement that authors of papers accepted to the IEEE SIGNAL PROCESSING LETTERS will have the option of presenting their papers in the next ICASSP or ICIP, if they so wish. This will reduce duplicate publication and allow quick turnaround for hot new ideas, while still allowing for the useful feedback associated with a conference presentation. Thanks to Anna Scaglione, Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE SIGNAL PROCESSING LETTERS, for this innovation and to the Conference Board for working with us on the implementation.

Finally, I want to remind authors and reviewers that we still accept articles that are extensions of work that has appeared in a conference publication, but the authors should make it clear what the extensions are in the submitted manuscript, which may be the addition of formal proofs, further algorithmic advances, additional experiments, and/or analysis.

We appreciate your contributions to our publications, and I welcome your suggestions of other improvements.