After a manuscript has been submitted to ITcon the editor-in-charge first takes a look at it to determine if it is of sufficient quality to be sent out for review. Roughly a third of all manuscripts are rejected at this stage, either based on poor scientific and presentation quality, or on the manuscript topic being outside the scope of ITcon. For those that pass this first hurdle, either the editor-in-charge or one of the other editors manages the review process (choice of reviewers, soliciting the reviews, remainders, making an editorial decision based on the reviews, communication with the author). ITcon requires two or three reviews per paper, and we have recently started to ask reviewers to return their reports within one month. A detailed review report form is provided which the reviewers can use. A small percentage of manuscripts are rejected after the first review round, but most manuscripts get sent back to the author with suggestions or requirements for improvements (minor revisions, major revisions). A small minority of manuscripts pass without any requirements for changes.

After revisions the author returns the manuscript to the managing editor who either checks the revisions on his own or returns the manuscript to the same reviewers. At the end of this process, the paper is either rejected or ready for publishing and is sent to the editorial assistant for final conversion to PDF, page numbering and posting on the web site. The papers are usually posted individually, but alerting messages are sent more seldom, thus creating virtual issues.

The process for special issues is similar, but here an external guest editor handles the process independently. The actual publication usually takes a few months longer, since the papers are published together and have to wait for “stragglers”.

During the period 1996-2004 the average time lag from initial submission to publication was 6,1 months for individually submitted papers and 7,1 for special issue papers. This can be compared to time lags of typically in the order of 18 months for competing subscription based journals. In the same period studied the number of ITcon submissions that eventually lead to a published paper was 55 %, which is on a par with most journals in the field that have published statistics (Björk & Turk 2005, Björk & Turk 2006).

by ŽT on 2006/12/10 17:50.