This document discusses peer-reviewed scientific journals and the process of publishing in them. It describes how scientific results must be independently verifiable, and journals provide a forum for this peer review process. The submission process involves choosing appropriate reviewers, the reviewing process, and the editorial decision on whether to accept, request revisions, or reject a paper. Overall it outlines the key aspects and challenges of scientific publishing.

1. Peer-reviewed scientific journals
Olivier Danvy
Department of Computer Science
Aarhus University
Aarhus Friday 7 May 2010
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Science
A scientific result
must be
independently verifiable.
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2. Reviewing
The process of
independent verification.
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A peer
Another scientist.
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3. A journal
An archival publication forum.
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Peer-reviewed scientific journals
Olivier Danvy
Department of Computer Science
Aarhus University
Aarhus Friday 7 May 2010
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4. Plan
1. Peer-reviewed scientific journals.
2. A first-person experience report.
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Origins
As pointed out by Jens-Christian Djurhuus:
• Ludvig Holberg (1750): peer-reviewing is
“the cause of scientific progress.”
• From the Royal Society (1660)
to the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences
and Letters (1742).
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5. Challenges
• the exponential growth of educated scientists
• a profitable business
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The publication cycle (1/2)
• submission of the initial report of a result
• assessment of appropriateness
• selection of reviewers
• reviewing
• editorial decision
• feedback to the author
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6. The publication cycle (2/2)
Possible outcomes:
• acceptation
• acceptation conditionally to some revision
• request for revision and resubmission
• outright rejection
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The submission
Which kind of article?
(cf. Parberry’s advice)
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7. Appropriateness?
Up to the editor(s) in chief.
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Which reviewers?
Tension:
• competence
• availability
And also:
• the candid reviewer
• the conflicts of interest
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8. The reviewing process
• can take time
• editorial backup plans
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Editorial decision
• assessment
• feedback to the reviewers, possibly
• outcome
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9. Feedback to the author
• acceptation
• acceptation conditionally to some revision
• request for revision and resubmission
• outright rejection
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So, a good journal
• publishes good papers, and
• reviews them quickly.
Plus, hey, bibliometrics.
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10. Jens Palsberg on scientific journals
“I hold these truths to be self-evident,
• that authors of a good paper deserve
a thorough and helpful review of their work
while authors of a bad paper deserve
to be told quickly that the journal
is an inappropriate venue for their work,
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• that reviewers deserve
to spend most of their time
on good papers, and
• that readers deserve
a journal with papers that
the review process has greatly improved.”
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11. Where to publish?
• in open journals (eg, lmcs-online.org)
• in associative organizations (ACM, IEEE)
• in private publishers (Springer, etc.)
But what about the copyright?
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The copyright issue
It is overblown:
In practice,
the publishers only copyright
one watermarked pdf file.
So: feel free to put the extended version
on your web page.
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12. On open access
• commercial publishers (the rich get richer)
• non-commercial publishers
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Plan
√
1. Peer-reviewed scientific journals.
2. A first-person experience report.
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13. Lisp
and Symbolic Computation
• founded in 1987
by Dick Gabriel and Guy Steele
• renamed in 1998
by Carolyn Talcott and myself
Higher-Order
and Symbolic Computation
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A niche journal
λ
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14. • The Mystery of the Tower Revealed
• Mix: A Self-Applicable Partial Evaluator
• Runtime Tags Aren’t Necessary
• SELF: The Power of Simplicity
• Callee-Save Registers in CPS
• Syntactic Abstraction in Scheme
• The Discoveries of Continuations
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• The Next 700 Formal Language Descriptions
• Polymorphic Type Assignment and CPS
• Recursion from Iteration
• Monads and Composable Continuations
• Call-by-Need and Continuation-Passing Style
• VLISP
among many others.
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15. My progression
• reader
• author and reviewer
• associate editor
• co-EiC
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Guidelines
• Claude Bishop:
How to edit a scientific journal
• Andrew Appel:
How to edit a scientific journal by e-mail
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16. Claude Bishop’s checklist
• have a record of published research
• be currently active in research
• be reasonably well organized
• have tact, diplomacy, and good judgment
• have a sense of humor
• be at an appropriate stage of their careers
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Ah, the power
• cool special issues (Strachey, Landin, etc.,
and partial evaluation, continuations, etc.)
• cool papers (Consel, Dybvig, Feeley, Futamu-
ra, Goldberg, Jagannathan, Henderson, Leroy,
Krivine, Morris, Queinnec, Reppy, Reps,
Reynolds, Steele, Sussman, Wand, etc.)
• editorials galore
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17. Christopher Strachey
• the idea and the opportunity
• the realization (e.g., Penrose)
• the marketing
• the impact (e.g., Scott, Dijkstra)
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Ah, the responsabilities
• “I am up for tenure soon!”
• This submission just does not cut it.
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18. The eternal battle
• authors
• copy-editors
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Example: Growing a Language
“This is the text of a talk
that I gave one day last fall,
in the tenth month of the year.
I have fixed a few bugs here and there
and changed a phrase or two
to make my thoughts more clear.”
...a booby trap for copy-editors.
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19. The way out
• a lot of diplomacy
(“they think they know what they are doing,
e.g., having formatted their PhD dissertation
themselves”)
• the actual style files:
what you write is what people will read
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Managing egos
• authors
• reviewers
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20. Useful reviews
1. summary
2. analysis
3. overall recommendation
4. misc.
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Editorial efficiency
• Reusing (or not) reviews of previous versions
of the submission.
• The other co-Editor in Chief.
• The Associate Editors.
• The Advisory Board.
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21. Two recommendations for authors
1. Submit short papers:
the shorter the submission,
the quicker it is reviewed.
2. When you are asked to review a submission,
just say yes.
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Editing: the ultimate charity work
• once upon a time in Western Jutland
• editors are taken for granted
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22. The future
• of scientific journals
• of editors
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Reference
Eric Norden’s hilarious short story:
“The Curse of the Mhondoro Nkabele”
in, e.g., Mike Resnick, ed.
Inside the Funhouse, 1992
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