Journal of Science and Technology of the Arts - My Last Editorial

citarj; scientific publishing; journal 05 Jan 2019

The Editorial for Volume 10, No. 1 issue of the Journal of Science and Technology of the Arts (CITARJ) was my last editorial as editor of this journal.

I have been working for CITARJ since 2011 and have been involved in various of the changes that have occurred throughout the years.

In this post, I publish a copy of my last editorial and I make a short overview of the history and evolution of CITARJ.

Editorial - Volume 10 No. 1

My last editorial for CITARJ (Cardoso, 2018):

In last year’s editorial, I described the various evolution phases through which the Journal of Science and Technology of the Arts (CITARJ) had gone since its inception in 2008. This year of 2018 marks the 10th volume of CITARJ and also the beginning of a new phase: the editorial team (editor and associate editors) is stepping down and a new team is taking over CITARJ. I am sure that the energy of the new team will keep CITARJ on the right track and push it to new levels of reputation, and scientific and editorial rigor.

CITARJ is now an established scientific journal. It has published an average of 16 articles+reviews per year in the last 5 years (compared to an average of 9 in the previous 5 years) – see Chart 1. It is indexed in DOAJ, Scopus, and Web of Science Core Collection – Emerging Sources Citation Index. It is now also listed in Scimago Journal & Country Rank and ranked in Quartile 2 for the “Visual Arts and Performing Arts” category.

CITARJ’s impact has also been steadily increasing. The average number of citations to our articles is now at about 0.3 citations per article (internal citations are residual as can be verified in Chart 2). Impact can also be observed in the growing number of full text downloads of our articles. Since we have started measuring in 2015, downloads have increased from about 1500 in 2015 to more than 4000 in 2018 (Chart 3).

Although we can consider CITARJ as an established journal, this does not mean that the new editorial team that is taking over in January 2019 can rest. Scientific publication is, perhaps now more than ever, a tricky business. Competition by commercial publishers is fierce and is now polluted with “predatory” publishers that could not care less about science, ethics, or rigor. Still, they are out there and constantly preying through our inboxes. CITARJ must find ways to reach new readers, authors, and editors while still abiding by privacy preserving regulations. CITARJ must continue its growth course in order to stay relevant both internally (within CITAR and the Portuguese Catholic University) and externally (nationally and internationally). This may require a different resource management strategy – one that encourages and recognizes volunteer work by the faculty of the School of Arts.

In this issue of CITARJ, Rita Xavier Monteiro and Helena Barranha discuss affectivity in the context of Post-Internet art. António Bandeira Araújo teaches you how to manually draw equirectangular virtual reality panoramas using a ruler, compass, and protractor. Mei-Kei Lai reviews how scent has been treated as an aesthetic medium in art and discusses opportunities for the use of olfactory displays. Pedro Pinto Neves, Leonel Morgado, and Nelson Zagalo propose a new model for agency in videogames using the concept of bio-costs contract. Finally, Kendra Chilson, and Máté Szabó provide us with a review of the exhibition “Thinking Machines: Art and Design in the Computer Age, 1959-1989”.

A Bit of History

2008-2011 - The Beginning

The Journal of Science and Technology of the Arts was established in 2008 in a decision of the scientific council of the Research Center for Science and Technology of the Arts (CITAR). In part (or maybe in whole) this decision was a result of a suggestion by the internal advisory board of CITAR to create its own publication(s) to disseminate the research of the center. The Director of CITAR at that time was Joaquim Azevedo, but the task of creating the journal was accomplished by Álvaro Barbosa, which was also the first editor of the journal.

Álvaro edited the first two issues of CITARJ (Figure 1). At that time, the journal was distributed mainly in print form (it was mailed to various institutions free of charge). There was already a website where each issue could also be downloaded. Figure 2 shows a screenshot, taken from Archive.org, of the website as it was in August 2011 (at this point the site had already some modifications made by the second editorial team). The editorial team that started CITARJ and edited the first two issues was composed of

• Álvaro Barbosa (Editor)
• Daniela Coimbra (Associate Editor)
• Vitor Teixeira (Associate Editor)
• Laura Castro (Editorial Assistant)

During the first three issues the editorial process was manual: all communication between authors, editors, and reviewers was through email, without any automated way of keeping the state of each submission.

The first editorial, by Álvaro Barbosa, read:

“CITAR Journal represents a very significant effort for the dissemination of research in the field of Science and Technology of the Arts. It brings together different areas of knowledge and understanding, as well as diverse approaches in the materialization of research practices into the form of Scientific Journal Articles. In this first issue we present work of substantial relevance in topics within experimental development fields in the Arts, such as, art heritage reconstruction with virtual reality techniques, novel interactive narrative methods, networked music performance, contemporary recasting of early electro-acoustic music repertoire, collaborative musical performance with robots, musicological studies of the 19th century and cinematic research on milestone documentaries in film history. As a complement to this issue we present the overview of two major Art events that took place in Portugal in 2008 (ARTECH and Musica Viva), as well as a review on a selected Book on Fine-Art (Anachroniques by Daniel Arasse). By publishing the CITAR Journal on a regular basis, the Portuguese Catholic University foresees the need to stimulate the visibility of new insights based on innovative developments in the field of the Arts trough Science and Technology. We hope you enjoy this first issue.” – (Barbosa, 2009)

The editorial points to the initial mission of CITARJ: dissemination of all research within the area of Science and Technology of the Arts. In essence, all research related to the scope of CITAR itself. The editorial also mentions a complement to the issue in the form of a review of two events and of a book. It is not clear to me how this structure of CITARJ came to be (having an Articles section for research papers, and a Reviews section for non-peer-reviewed overviews of events and book reviews), but it was maintained until today.

2011-2014 - Processes

In 2011, the journal saw its first change in the editorial team, with Carlos Caires becoming the new editor with me as the editorial assistant:

• Carlos Sena Caires (Editor)
• Sofia Serra (Associate Editor)
• Vitor Teixeira (Associate Editor)
• Jorge Cardoso (Editorial Assistant)

This period that started in 2011 was a period of great changes (mostly operative) in the journal. During this period, we tried to address 3 axes of development for the journal:

1. Improvement of the editorial process;
2. Improvement of the publication quality;
3. Increasing the visibility of CITARJ.

One of the first (small) things we did was to add a listing of all articles published in a given issue and to allow individual download of the articles PDFs (Figure 3). We also started submitting the article PDFs to Mendeley (I think Mendeley was the first “database” where our articles started to appear).

It soon became obvious that maintaining the editorial process based on email communication would not scale well and that manually submitting the articles to databases and indexing services would not be feasible. We needed a tool to help us with these tasks. I personally looked at various alternatives but, given that we needed something that would have no direct costs, I found only one valid possibility: Open Journal Systems (OJS). We installed and tried it and decided to use it both as a workflow management tool, but also as a publishing platform.

I don’t think CITARJ had any formal editorial process at that time and OJS also helped to better understand the various steps that a manuscript can go through before final publication. This helped us improve the editorial process by having a more formal process that authors and reviewers had to adhere to. We also looked at the author guidelines and improved them by providing a document template.

Having a platform like OJS meant that we also had our articles’ metadata published in a machine-readable format which made it easier to submit CITARJ to various indexing services and databases. In 2012 CITARJ was submitted and accepted in Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and we (the School of Arts) also registered as a member of CrossRef so that articles published by CITARJ could be assigned a DOI and enter the Cited By network. This would allow a better dissemination and, hence, increased visibility of CITARJ’s articles.

In 2012, we also decided to launch an international call for papers, with the intention of attracting more submissions. As a new journal, one of the difficulties was in attracting a sufficiently high number of submissions so that we could published only high-quality papers. Having a low number of submissions means that you might be forced to publish a lower-quality paper in order to have a minimum number of articles in one issue of the journal.

During this period, we also started improving the information on the journal’s website with the goal of submitting it to Scopus and Web of Science (submitting to these indexing services was a goal set in the beginning by Álvaro, but these services require a minimum number of published issues so only now could it be done).

Three volumes were published during this phase (see Figure 4).

2014-2018 - Consolidation

In 2014 there was another change in the editorial team. I became editor with Sahra Kunz and Sofia Serra as Associate Editors. (Later, Guilhermina Castro and Cristina Sá, would replace Sofia Serra in the editorial team.)

This was mainly a consolidation period. We introduced minor improvements in the instructions for authors and added instructions for reviewers. We also added ethics guidelines based on COPE’s (Committee on Publication Ethics) Best Practice Guidelines for Journal Editors.

CITARJ finally got accepted in Scopus and Web of Science’s new index - ESCI (Emerging Sources Citation Index), and now also appears in Scimago Journal & Country Rank.

We re-organized the editorial board, ceasing the collaboration with some of the previous members, and inviting new ones. In part, this was due to a change in scope of the journal, imposed by the scientific council of CITAR. This change in scope removed some of the areas that CITARJ would accept (such as Conservation and Restoration; Cultural Heritage Studies).

We also introduced changes in the editorial process. CITARJ used to follow a blind peer-review process that we changed to double blind peer-review. This requires authors and editors to do a bit of extra work (editors need to check that the files that authors submit are really anonymized and in some cases perform additional anonymization before sending to reviewers) but assures us more impartiality in the review process.

One of the biggest changes of this period was the introduction of special issues in CITARJ. These would allow CITARJ to publish issues with a clear and restricted theme (something that does not happen in the regular issues) and to potentially reach a broader audience and attract new authors. In 2014, 2015, and 2016 CITARJ published two issues per volume (one regular and one special). In 2017 and 2018 CITARJ published three issues.

The final big change in CITARJ was operating with a zero-budget. Following a budget cut in CITAR, I decided that it would not make sense to spend money printing copies of the journal or paying for pagination services. I adapted the existing print layout to Microsoft Word (with a few changes to make it easier to layout) and performed pagination in Word myself. After a few numbers, it got easier and faster to paginate a complete number, but it still represented a lot of effort – definitely something to reconsider in the future. I also started making CITARJ available on a print-on-demand platform – Lulu.com. Instead of spending CITAR’s money printing the journal, we allowed readers to buy the print version directly from Lulu if they so wished.

We published 5 numbers during this phase (see Figures 5 through 9).

Ending remarks

CITARJ has been great learning journey for me. I knew virtually nothing about scientific publishing (and still have a lot to learn) and helping to build CITARJ almost from the ground up (from a journal with two published issues, to an indexed journal) provided an excellent learning opportunity. Having to deal with disgruntled, unethical authors, unprofessional reviewers and guest editors on the one hand, but also highly professional and dedicated authors, reviewers, and editors broadened my view scientific publishing. I now have a better sense of what is expected of me when acting as an author, reviewer, or editor of a journal.

References

Barbosa, Á. (2009). Editorial. Journal Of Science And Technology Of The Arts, 1(1), 0-3. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.7559/citarj.v1i1.22

Cardoso, J. (2018). Editorial. Journal Of Science And Technology Of The Arts, 10(1), 1- 01-02. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.7559/citarj.v10i1.575