Moving Forward: Continuous Article Publishing, Internationalization and Social Media Dissemination

The Journal of Aerospace Technology and Management (JATM), was created in 2009 in Brazil by a group of researchers from the Instituto de Aeronáutica e Espaço. It was conceived and already from its beginning concerned with not becoming characterized as a local, regional or institutional journal. With the target public clearly defined, the international aerospace community led the formation of its editorial committee, internationalizing the board of ad hoc referees, and the process of searching for and selecting articles by authors affiliated with international institutions.

Thus, the decision to publish in English language became imperative and made visibility possible internationally, hence making JATM able to index in the most relevant bibliographic bases and to receive citations in high profile journals. In addition, the alignment of the editorial process with the best practices of scientific publication attributed JATM to the characteristics of internationally recognized journals, thereby becoming a reliable option for publishing results of aerospace research.

This high level of quality, which is a direct result of the work of a highly motivated and committed team, can be verified by means of important indicators, such as the indexing of Scopus, Redalyc, SciELO and the Emerging Sources Citation Index of the Web of Science™ Core Collection. These are important steps forward in integrating with the Science Citation Index base, a requirement for a journal to be part of the Journal of Citation Report and to recieve its calculated Impact Factor (IF).

These characteristics have been incorporated over the course of time. Now the time has come to take another step forward, driven by a significant increase in the number of manuscript submissions, which has been demanding a greater commitment from section editors in the process of evaluation and selection of articles. In fact, these are good news, as these advances have resulted in the selection of more interesting articles with greater potential for citation, which will ultimately contribute to progress in the area of knowledge.

However, this increase causes the damming of approved articles that stand in wait for publication, which on average has taken up to 6 months. This situation is not consistent with the goals of scientific dissemination in journals. Causing harm to authors who need to disseminate knowledge and also the journal itself - which then no longer has its content shared and thus postpones possible citations with prejudice in its metrics.

In order to accelerate the dissemination of already approved articles, JATM began publishing isolated articles in the form of “ahead of print”, without designation of volume, number or pagination. Thus offering the immediate dissemination of knowledge. Articles published in ahead of print, presuppose the subsequent printed publication, organized in a number and volume, with fixed periodicity. This caused confusion in the citation form of the article, which was only possible to be carried out correctly after the printed publication with the definitive pagination, penalizing the accounting in the article metrics, since erroneous citations are not listed by the indexing databases.

It was then realized that more changes were needed and the JATM Editorial Committee decided to change the periodicity of its publication, and from now on JATM will have its online version published continuously and no longer in the form of quarterly numbers. In this model, articles are published definitively, as soon as their analysis and editorial production is concluded. Thus, it is not necessary to wait for the composition of issues, avoiding the unnecessary hindrance of the works, publishing the results of the researches more quickly and regularly (Parker 2016; Cirasella and Bowdoin 2013; Romito 2017).

The commitment to publish the most relevant results from the aerospace area continues and the number of articles published will remain the same, as will the quality standard. Expectations are to have the articles published at an accelerated pace, within 45 days of approval. An aspect of highest importance is the way in which the articles will be cited. Continuously published articles will no longer have sequential pagination and will instead display the e-locator, the definitive and unique identifier for each article, in addition to the year of publication and volume, and this is to be the mandatory form that will appear in all bibliographic indexes. The e-locator complements the DOI (Digital Object Identifier) record already given to each of the published articles. To avoid errors, every article published in JATM will now display the citation style on its first page, directing authors to cite likewise.

Continuous publication will certainly solve the problem of impending articles for publication. However, it will not help in reducing the evaluation time, which in some cases reaches 8 months. Having an editorial body committed to the evaluation time and its quality is fundamental to decrease the evaluation time. We decided, then, to restructure the composition of the editorial committee, inviting new collaborators with a specific profile. This way, researchers that were not only influential and recognized in specific areas could contribute to the dissemination of JATM among their peers so that the body of reviewers could be even more diverse and new authors and readers reached. To give transparency to the review process and as a way of acknowledging the work of the section editor, from now on his name will be published in each article.

One very important issue in managing a journal is the dissemination of content and some actions related to dissemination in media are in progress. As the JATM publication is free and complimentary, we instead request that authors support actions to increase the visibility of published articles by participating in the social media in which JATM has a profile (Twitter, LinkdIn, Facebook, Mendeley, Academia.edu and Research gate). We also publish article releases on specific blogs complementing efforts of outreach on social medias.

As an objective, it is our ambition to expand JATM’s widespread and attract more high impact manuscripts to stand out as a high-level journal in aerospace.

The printed version of JATM will no longer be published in its original periodicity. We intend to publish special or thematic volumes with selected articles. The printed version will leave the role of main vehicle of dissemination of scientific content, assuming the role of marketing vehicle.

Finally, we thank all the contributors who have supported JATM since its inception, especially the former chief editors.

REFERENCES

• Packer A, et al (2016) Acelerando a comunicação das pesquisas: as ações do SciELO [online]. SciELO em Perspectiva. [accessed on 11 November 2017]. Available at: http://blog.scielo.org/blog/2016/03/10/acelerando-a-comunicacao-das-pesquisas-as-acoes-do-scielo/
  » http://blog.scielo.org/blog/2016/03/10/acelerando-a-comunicacao-das-pesquisas-as-acoes-do-scielo/
• Cirasella J, Bowdoin S (2013) Just Roll with It? Rolling Volumes vs. Discrete Issues in Open Access Library and Information Science Journals. Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication. 1(4), p.eP1086. doi: 10.7710/2162-3309.1086
  » https://doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.1086
• Romito GA (2017) Editorial. Braz. oral res. [online]. 31, suppl.1, e77. doi: 10.1590/1807-3107bor-2017.vol31.0077
  » https://doi.org/10.1590/1807-3107bor-2017.vol31.0077

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  2018

History

• Received
  12 Nov 2017
• Accepted
  16 Nov 2017