In honor of JASA Express Letters’ (JASA-EL) two-year anniversary as a fully independent, gold open access journal, we’re taking a trip down memory lane with three figures who’ve been involved with the journal over the years: Christy Holland, of University of Cincinnati, who took part in the inception of JASA-EL’s predecessor, Acoustic Research Letters Online, and the creation of JASA-EL; Keith Wilson of US Army Engineer Research and Development Center, the first JASA-EL Editor; and Charlie Church, current Editor of JASA-EL. Listen to these three ASA members tell tales from their tenures with the ASA and reflect on the shifting landscape of scholarly publishing over the past 20+ years!
Read more from JASA Express Letters.
Learn more about Acoustical Society of America Publications
Music: Min 2019 by minwbu from Pixabay. https://pixabay.com/?utm_source=link-attribution&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=music&utm_content=1022
In honor of JASA Express Letters’ (JASA-EL) two-year anniversary as a fully independent, gold open access journal, we’re taking a trip down memory lane with three figures who’ve been involved with the journal over the years: Christy Holland, of University of Cincinnati, who took part in the inception of JASA-EL’s predecessor, Acoustic Research Letters Online, and the creation of JASA-EL; Keith Wilson of US Army Engineer Research and Development Center, the first JASA-EL Editor; and Charlie Church, current Editor of JASA-EL. Listen to these three ASA members tell tales from their tenures with the ASA and reflect on the shifting landscape of scholarly publishing over the past 20+ years!
Read more from JASA Express Letters.
Learn more about Acoustical Society of America Publications
Music: Min 2019 by minwbu from Pixabay. https://pixabay.com/?utm_source=link-attribution&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=music&utm_content=1022
Kat Setzer (KS)
00:06
Welcome to Across Acoustics, the official podcast of the Acoustical Society of America’s Publications office. On this podcast, we will highlight research from our four publications. I'm your host, Kat Setzer, Editorial Associate for the ASA.
Today in honor of the two-year anniversary of JASA Express Letters becoming a fully independent, gold open-access journal, we're taking a little trip down memory lane to talk about JASA-EL’s history, particularly in terms of electronic publishing. For background, JASA-EL started out as an online-only open-access journal called Acoustics Research Letters Online, or ARLO, from 1999 to 2005. It transitioned to a JASA Express Letters special section in JASA from 2006 to 2020, and launched as an online only, gold open access journal in 2021.
Joining me today are JASA-EL’s, current editor Charlie Church, as well as Christy Holland of the University of Cincinnati and Keith Wilson of the US Army Engineer Research and Development Center. Thanks for taking the time to speak with me today. First, can you tell me a bit about yourselves and what your roles were with ARLO and JASA Express Letters?
Keith Wilson (KW)
01:18
Oh, I'll go first, since I think I was the first editor. So like Kat said, I'm Keith Wilson with the Engineer Research and Development Center. I got my start in acoustics at Penn State. I was in the graduate program in acoustics there. And then I went to Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution for a couple of years. And since then, I've been doing research in acoustics for the army. And I first became involved with ASA Publications as an associate editor for noise for JASA, and I did that for a few years. And then Allan Pierce asked if I wanted to take over JASA Express Letters, and I guess I'll, we'll be talking about that more later. So I'll stop there.
Charlie Church (CC)
02:15
I'm Charlie Church. I am the current editor of JASA Express Letters. My backgrounds are in biomedical acoustics and physical acoustics, probably greater emphasis on biomedical. I'm currently retired and this is my only real job that pays anything at all. And that's okay, Uncle Sam is taking care of me pretty well. So that's fine. But I retired from the University of Mississippi a few years ago. And I first got involved with Arlo, I published an article there I was a reviewer there then subsequently also for Express letters. And so I think my first paper was published in ARLO, or my first paper in this format published in ARLO in 2005, toward the end of its existence as a journal called ARLO. But I've been involved as an editor, associate editor, reviewer, whatever, with Express Letters, since it got that name.
Christy Holland (CH)
03:24
And I'm Christy Holland. I'm from the University of Cincinnati, I think I've been invited into this, this wonderful group of people to talk about publishing because I trained with Bob Apfel at Yale. I was a grad student and a postdoc. And it was during that time that Bob, I think, recognized the need for more rapid publication and particularly online. And so I think, ARLO was his brainchild, if I understand history correctly, and we got to hear about it at the lunch table. And what's interesting is it inspired both me to be interested in scientific publishing—I served as the editor in chief of Ultrasound in Medicine and Biology, which is the official journal of the World Federation of Ultrasound in Medicine and Biology, from 2006 to 2021, so for 15 years plus. And also, Ron Roy was a fellow graduate student and he, I believe, also served as editor in chief of ARLO from, is it 2002 to 2005? So he predated Keith and I think Bob was the first editor, is that correct? So that's kind of how the timeline rolls, is first Bob Apfel, then Ron Roy, then Keith Wilson, and then Charlie Church. I also served as chair of the committee that hired Jim Lynch as editor in chief of JASA as well as Charlie Church as editor in chief of JASA-EL. So I've been very interested in scientific publishing and really shepherding good science into the public for years.
CC
05:04
Christy, you did leave out Jim's tenure as editor in chief of JASA-EL.
CH
05:14
Oh, thanks for pointing that out. Ever the editor, Charlie. You're doing a great job. Yeah. So yeah, Jim was editor from 2009 to 2014. So there's the history. So ARLO and JASA-EL have been around since 1999.
KS
05:36
What was scholarly publishing at the time that ARLO came into being? Was online publishing much of a thing? What made folks with the ASA decide to create the online journal?
CH
05:45
I think this was a lunch table conversation with grad students and Bob Apfel back in the day. So from my perspective, it was this interest in accelerating the process of publishing. Because once you read a paper at that time, you really were reading about experiments and theoretical work that had been done two years prior. It would take almost two years, you know, to get a paper through the review process, and then it would be accepted, and then it would be put in line and wait for a print journal, and then those journals had to be mailed to you to your office, and then you would get one every month and pore over it, or you would have to get to the library to read it. And so it was very slow process. And, and I think all of us were very interested in accelerating that process.
CC
06:34
Yeah, it can be really frustrating waiting those two years, and it really often was a period of two years before or between doing the experiments and writing it up and sending off the manuscript and eventually seeing it in print later on. And that was, that was terrible. It was like sitting in a dentist's chair for two years waiting for your tooth to be pulled. It was just awful.
KW
07:00
And it was a lot more work for the editors, too, because we had to handle everything through snail mail. You know, we would receive papers from authors through the mail, and I think they would have to submit like three different copies so that two copies could be sent to two reviewers, and we would keep one and it was just a lot of work, a lot of mailing, and it took a long time.
CH
07:27
and not very environmentally friendly.
KS
07:30
No, no, not at all. Sounds like a lot of trees died for the review process. So how did Arlo get started?
CH
07:38
1999 was the first publication I think. I know I was an early adopter, too. And I think a lot of it was word of mouth, the editors cajoling authors into submitting a paper, too. It wasn't it wasn't a popular thing. You have to really attract good science. And so the early editors really played a huge role in attracting authors to submit.
KS
08:03
What were the conversations, creating it in the first place? Do you know? Like, do you know what the conversations like at the ASA were or anything like that?
CH
08:11
I remember Bob being very excited about presenting at Council. And we all helped him prepare for that. And he was very happy afterwards, because I think he thought that he received support. And it is something that's very nice about the Acoustical Society of America in general is that they embrace change, particularly if it supports science. And it's a very collegial society in terms of supporting new fresh ideas. And I think Bob had those ideas. And but I think he also received a lot of support.
KW
08:50
Yeah, I recall, Bob coming to meetings of the physical acoustics TC, yeah, at that time, I was probably just a graduate student or just finish my PhD, and he would promote ARLO very enthusiastically. And, you know, at that time, it was a bit of a peculiar thing, this idea of online publishing. But as I recall, people were pretty enthusiastic about it.
KS
09:19
So what ended up happening with ARLO? Why did ARLO become JASA Express Letters?
KW
09:24
Well, so I think initially ARLO wasn't receiving very many papers, you know, probably a combination of it being a new thing, but also at that time, I think there was still probably an attitude that if it didn't appear in print, it wasn't a real publication. Yes, a paper just appearing online was still kind of an ephemeral thing. And also, you know, it's just more prestigious, I suppose, to get an article published in JASA, as opposed to Arlo because ARLO just didn't have the brand name at the time. So I believe ARLO was having some challenges getting established and getting enough papers and a reputation.
CH
10:09
I think it hasn't changed much, you know, today, even today, we're judged by our impact, right? And the impact factor or your H index, it's how many times… It's not necessarily whether or not you publish and the number of, how many published, but each publication, how much impact does it have. And so there's metrics to follow that in terms of the number of citations, and if people are simply not reading a journal or citing those papers, then your paper won't have impact, and authors are going to look elsewhere to publish their paper where they do have impact. So you know, starting a new journal, and getting those statistics of citations are very challenging. And it's a lot of hard work on the part of the editors to get the word out. And at the end of the day, the authors within the journal and other journals have all the power, and they choose whether or not to cite those works. And it’s those citations that give papers weight in the scientific community.
KS
11:03
Right, that makes sense. Charlie, can you tell us about the relaunch of JASA Express Letters in 2021? What was the impetus for that?
CC
11:10
Well, more than one, actually. The one that I think of first now, is that there's an initiative to make all research reports free and available to the public. With regard to open access, we're a gold level, or we call ourselves a gold-level open access journal. And that means that every paper we publish is published under Creative Commons License CCBY 4.0, which is gobbledygook; you can look it up online to get the exact meanings for that. But it means that the authors retain the copyright for their own material, which is sort of unusual, even now. And so that's good for them. But the Creative Commons license allows anybody who can access the journal and that means, in our case, anybody who has access to the internet, can download it, they can read it, they can assimilate it into their bank of knowledge, they can use parts of it, they can do almost anything with it, as long as they cite the original source. And that's, that's good for authors. It's good for science, because it makes the transfer of knowledge from one person to another easy and not terribly expensive, except, of course somebody has to pay to get the publication out.
It was also printed in JASA proper for a while. And the new Express Letters is now separate, a separate journal, available online only. And there's a lot of work involved in getting decent manuscripts. But one of the problems with it right now is that it does not have an impact factor. And because it's less than two years old, and you need two years of experience with your journal before they can even calculate an impact factor for you. So we're looking forward to getting our first Impact Factor. We hope in June, when the next batch comes out, when all the updates come out.
So we have a number of other things that we're doing now that we call ourselves “new.” We've increased the page limit for the, for the articles we publish. It's still a letters format. So the length of the article is still limited to seven pages. Papers that are particularly good and noteworthy, we put them as Editor’s Picks on the website. We've commissioned articles from experts.
And because we're new journal, we're not indexed in a large number of indices around the world, but we are indexed in the Web of Science. And we've recently been notified that we’ll be indexed on PubMed, that is the National Library of Medicine. And that's, that's a really big step forward for us.
KW
14:20
I think JASA Express Letters has undergone a very interesting cycle here, where, you know, initially, it grew out of Acoustics Research Letters Online, and it was incorporated into JASA, in order to give it, I think, some additional legitimacy. And, you know, thus it became JASA Express Letters. And, you know, it was it existed in that state for over 10 years. And now, recently, it's been extracted again from regular JASA and made into its own journal. And I like to think that's because it grew up, and that, you know, now ASA realizes that Express Letters has enough legitimacy, and enough of a community, that it could stand on its own. And so now that move made sense.
CH
15:21
Let’s look at that word, “express.” How express are these letters these days, Charlie? How long does it take, on average, to go through the whole process and appear online?
CC
15:33
Well, it's about half the time it takes for an article in JASA to appear. So that's something, but it's not as fast as we want. So the first decision is 42 days, and to acceptance is 82 days from submission.
KS
15:48
Yeah. And then it's usually a couple of weeks after acceptance to actual publication.
CH
15:55
That's still... It compares favorably probably with JASA, and any other competing journal, I would suspect. That’s very good.
KS
16:06
Yeah. It’s… Taking into consideration what you guys are saying it was before ARLO, right, where it was like, oh, it's two years of waiting. Probably, what, half? is what we were saying of what JASA is, and then once again, over time, you know, since the past 20, you know, 20 years ago, it's significantly faster, because you're talking three months instead of two years.
CH
16:34
So you live up to your “Express” name, then. That's great
CC
16:37
Well, we try to.
KW
16:38
I think one of the main challenges is trying to change the culture of authors and reviewers and editors, so that they process manuscripts quickly. And one of the keys to that, in my view, is helping reviewers understand that Express Letters does not want to create situations where authors are expected to do major revisions. And yeah, that was one of the struggles early as we set up the website. So basically, there were three choices: accept, accept with minor revisions, or reject, and reviewers would always say, “Well, I want to send it back to the author for major revisions.” But Allan and I felt like that was contrary to the purpose of Express Letters, and that if we were to establish a culture of really publishing things quickly, we had to, you know, get in this mindset where, you know, papers basically had to be accepted with minor revisions, or rejected and there wasn’t all this gray space in between.
CC
18:03
We still are trying to do that. We have added one other type of reject, which we call a “soft rejection.” And that means that the reviewers think the science is good, but the writing for the manuscript is not. We give it a soft, we give papers like that, or submissions like that, a soft reject, and the authors can take whatever length of time they need in order to bring that up to par, bring that writing up to par, and then resubmit it as a new submission.
KS
18:38
We technically also have a revise decision now. A regular one, not just accept with minor revisions. But, yeah.
CH
18:48
So I've got a question for the current editor, Charlie. So what papers impact, your highly cited papers the most? that's usually a good way of knowing how to make your journal even hotter, is to study who the highest, and what the highest cited papers are? And then you can do more of that. But when your impact factor does come out, there's usually only a handful of papers unless you're in the stratosphere of you know, 100, an H index of 100, or something as a journal. But if you have an impact factor of like, you know, even 50, there's only about 50 papers that impact your impact factor in a meaningful way. And looking at that list is sometimes very elucidating.
KW
19:33
I think it's challenging in acoustics, right? Because many of our papers have a very long half-life, but not necessarily much of a two-year impact factor. So yeah, it's hard for an acoustics journal to look at.
CC
19:53
Yeah. For example, in my case, I work with bubbles. And there was a paper published by by Lord Rayleigh in 1917. And I referenced that sucker 90 years later, you know. There is no such thing as a 90-year impact factor, but it was it's a good paper, it's only four or five pages long. It's really interesting.
CH
20:15
So that tells you something about your journal, too. If you see the highest-cited papers are the older ones, not the ones within the last two years, that in and of itself is very elucidating. Looking at that list and seeing when they were published. And I would suspect that Express Letters, though, is going to be more current, and it will have a nice citation habit for the last two years, I would think.
CC
20:43
Well, we certainly hope so.
CH
20:45
Yeah, I would think that you’d do very well.
KS
20:50
There's also the issue of us not having an impact factor right now, for JASA-EL, because it's that two-year waiting period until the first impact factor comes in. And some people, especially young researchers, have to publish with places that have impact factors. Early career researchers rather.
CC
21:09
Yeah, that's true, I have to admit that when I was young, I never looked at an impact factor of a journal before I decided where to send it. And it just didn't occur to me as something to do. I wanted it to go to the journal that would allow or provide a good readership for that particular paper, that kind of paper. And, yeah, whether the world thought it was a dandy journal or not, it just, I didn't care. But the world has changed, you know.
KS
21:40
Right, that I think it might depend on the fields too, like, I've heard people from animal bioacoustic, saying that they need to be at a minimum of a 2.0 impact factor in a journal, for it to be counted towards the tenure or whatever.
CC
21:54
If you can get your paper published in Proceedings of National Academies or, or, you know, Nature or Science, you're doing well. You don't have to worry about that sort of thing. But for the normal persons among us, which is almost everybody, nowadays, you do have to worry about that sort of thing.
CH
22:14
That's also a cultural thing. In China, for instance, they are judged by the impact factor of the journal. And so whenever I would travel to China as editor in chief of UMB, I would hear a lot from the authors in China that they just couldn't submit their papers to my journal, because the impact factor wasn't high enough.
KS
22:36
Do you guys have any fun stories from your tenures? Either knowing Bob Apfel or when you were starting off, Keith, or when you were starting off, Charlie?
KW
22:47
Sure. I could tell a bit of a story of how things got started. So you know, to be honest, I'm still not sure to this day, why Allan thought I was the right person to be the first editor of JASA Express Letters. I mean, it's because I had been handling papers in noise for several years. And I was a conscientious editor, I think it might have also been because he thought I understood aspects of electronic publishing and multimedia and things like that. But I remember very well, how Allan invited me to Boston University. Saana McDaniel, who is the manuscript manager back then, as well as now, came to pick me up at South Station, and they drove me to Boston University, and we sat in a conference room there and Express Letters was born. We worked through all the procedures, how things were going to be set up online, and what our responsibilities were. And yeah, it seems kind of hard to believe looking back on it that, you know, small, kind of informal meeting, was the start of a new journal.
KS
24:15
Yeah, that’s so neat.
CC
24:17
Yeah, Saana, Saana is great. She really worked hard. And when I first joined as editor in 2014, she and I were the staff, you know, that was, that was it. You know, and we've since through, I'm sure, the efforts of Jim Lynch, our Editor in Chief, increase the number of staff so that we can do much more than we used to do, which is wonderful.
KW
24:50
Another topic that I recall, we discussed quite a bit was the format of the manuscripts. So ARLO had, a kind of single-column format. And you know, the idea behind the single-column format is it's much more natural to read on your computer screen. With JASA’s double column format, you basically have to read down the first column, and then you need to scroll your browser back up and start reading the second column. So when ARLO was incorporated into JASA as Express Letters, there was a lot of discussion about whether we should go to the JASA two-column format, or have articles and JASA basically appear in two different formats. And yeah, we we ultimately decided to keep the single-column format for Express Letters, which I think was the right decision, because that is much more in line with the purpose of the journal.
CC
25:59
You want this, this article to be basically, short and sweet. You want all the important stuff up front, and any the extraneous stuff or the less important stuff that might go into a full-length paper. And of course, in JASA, they can be any length, if you're willing to foot the bill for that extra length. And Express Letters, it doesn't matter how much money you have, you get to a point, and that's it, you can't have more than a certain number of pages.
KW
26:30
Yeah, I, I appreciate the letter format. I think there is a certain art to writing such a concise, focused article. But it's often much better for readers, you know, because you can get the gist of the topic very quickly, you don't have to spend spent a long time reading it. And, yeah, it's not appropriate for all types of science communication. But I do think that it's a very nice format when the author, especially when the author is good at using it.
KS
27:14
So as the scholarly publishing industry is changing, where do you see JASA Express Letters going in the future?
CC
27:21
Well, because we're a gold open-access journal, and there is a significant movement afoot in the world, or particular parts of the world to make all science openly available to everybody, I think we're well situated. I think journals that charge fees for everything, put things behind a paywall, that sort of thing, may be at a disadvantage in the future. When funding agencies get used to the fact that somebody has to pay for a publication that is paid for having their results published, this, this will become a natural thing that other journals may have to follow.
KW
28:05
Yeah, one thing that particularly concerns me about trends in publishing is with the proliferation of smaller online publishers, I wonder how many authors will submit papers to these publishers thinking that they're going to be more or less permanently archived? And I think that, you know, we need journals like Express Letters, who can actually make good on the contract with authors, basically, that, you know, this is going to be permanently available as part of the scientific literature. You know, without that we don't, you know, as researchers, we're losing important parts of our legacy.
CC
28:56
Yeah, this society, the Acoustical Society has been around for about 100 years. And there's no reason it's not going to stick around. So I have that in that regard, I have a warm and fuzzy feeling about publishing and JASA, or Express Letters.
KS
29:16
Do you all have any other thoughts you want to share at all or stories?
CH
29:21
I think it's a really natural progression from ARLO to JASA-EL. And now you know where we are today, in terms of online, it makes perfect sense to me that you are on trend and doing the right things. And I am interested to see how it shakes out, where it's the author pays as opposed to the reader pays for, for the privilege of reading the science. I'm still not convinced that the author should have to write the grant, or work in an institution that pays for the research should then do the research and write the paper and then also pay for everyone else to read the paper, too. There's something that just doesn't sit well with me. I think it should be a shared responsibility. Maybe it's more of a socialist thought. But but there's just something about the author having to pay for everything that doesn't sit right for me now. It takes a lot of money to get a paper published. And there are other people that touch the paper besides the authors. And so there does need to be money that exchanges hands all around, but whether that should be stuck on the author only? I'm not sure that makes sense to me.
CC
30:48
Yeah, you know, we do have a waiver policy and program for people who just can't afford the publication charges. And if you're retired, like I am, and you want to write a paper, but you can't afford, you know, whatever the cost is, you basically write to me and say, by the way, I'm retired, what can you do about this cost?
KW
31:12
Yeah, I think there are major questions about what the business model will be for the publishing industry moving forward, and I sure hope that the professional societies like ASA can continue to thrive because it's really important to ensuring the high quality of the scientific literature and also that the articles continue to be available into posterity.
CH
31:44
Nods all around.
KS
31:46
Yeah, agreed.
CH
31:47
Well, Kat, thank you.
KS
31:48
Yeah. Thank you all. Thank you for taking the time to speak with me today. It's been interesting to learn about the history of our little publication, and how its evolution has sort of reflected what's going on in scholarly publishing as a whole. I think our listeners will really appreciate it.
Thank you for tuning into Across Acoustics. If you'd like to hear more interviews from our authors about their research, please subscribe and find us on your preferred podcast platform.