Separating the Issue from the Priority

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Last year I was busy revising an article in response to referee suggestions when a friend asked if I could include a citation of his own, recently-published paper. It was a perfect fit — its topic and results made a great addition to my reference list — but there was one problem. Despite the new year being months away, the journal issue my friend’s work was published in was already dated 2010. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on your point of view), further referee hassle delayed my own article long enough to avoid the surreal possibility of having a paper that cited work from the future as well as the past.

It’s surely clear to anyone that this kind of separation between the issue date and the date of publication priority is an anachronistic hangover caused by publishers trying to shoehorn electronically-published articles into the slow plod of print release schedules. It should also be clear that this way of doing things has some serious risks for authors. Suppose that my friend had rivals working on similar material — they could have rushed out their own work in another, speedier journal, and if the year of publication was anything to go by, it would have looked like the priority was theirs. Those little “received on ... accepted on ...” notices, or “early online editions”, just don’t cut it compared to (Rival et al., 2009; Friend et al., 2010).

In fact, as anyone who’s operated a blog knows, the Web has pretty much done away with the need for volumes and issues. Freed from page constraints (both minimum and maximum), you can release things as soon as they’re ready: articles can be published in a continuous stream, needing only a date and a unique identifier. A lot of Open Access or online-only journals have begun to work like this, with volume and issue being determined by the year and month of publication, and articles having an ID instead of page numbers.

Since ICaST is a purely electronic magazine, we decided to adopt a similar system — with a couple of bits of flavour to reflect our particularly web- and tech-oriented way of doing things. That’s why ICaST’s very first release is labelled volume 10, issue 03 (or ICaST 10.03, as we write it, in tribute to software version numbers): a similar system, but with quarterly issues, will be employed by ICST Transactions. If this runs the mild risk of people wondering where volumes 1 through 9 have gone, it has the advantage that just by looking at the citation, you can tell exactly when a given ICaST article was first published. Our upcoming unique article IDs will operate according to the same principle, except that these will be generated from the date of first receipt — so an ICaST citation will you both the submission and publication date before you even look at the article.

The core of ICaST will thus be a live stream of articles published online the moment they are given final approval. As an author, you can opt to delay the release if you like — perhaps to coordinate the release of several related pieces — but it’s a choice that’s in your hands, rather than an imposition determined by our release schedule. The live stream will be prominently displayed so you can always see what the latest additions are, and you will be able to browse it according to year, month, week or day.

Does this mean we are setting aside the traditional magazine idea of an organised monthly selection of material? No, not at all. What it means is that organisation, like publication, should reflect the possibilities of the Web. Instead of static “issues” we will be creating dynamic editions — portals onto each month’s content that highlight the best and may also reference relevant articles from the past. They will be released in the middle of each month, so that in the first two weeks you will see the new content building up in the live stream, while in the second two weeks of the month the newly-released edition will continue to grow. Our home page will be a mixture of the two — mostly the contents of the current edition, but highlighting interesting or important new articles as they arrive.

Importantly, the editions will be completely decoupled from the citation information, which in our system is a property of individual articles and their time of receipt and publication. The live stream means that there will no longer be the artificial separation of issue and priority that my friend suffered — your citation will reflect the date your article was first released, regardless which ICaST edition your article ends up being most prominently highlighted in. (This article was published on 28 April — its volume and issue are ICaST 10.04 — but it's going to be highlighted in the edition released in May.)

Our Special Issues will operate in a similar way, as dedicated portals decoupled from the regular monthly editions. This has three advantages. First, we don’t have to reserve a particular month’s edition for these purposes, or hold up other articles in the process. Second, the Special Issues don’t have to fit in with our regular schedule — they can go live the moment they feel they have sufficient content. And third, with a flexible portal, the Special Issue doesn’t have to be set in stone — we can update it with new contributions, and also include related articles from the past.

Finally, there’s one thing we can do with this live, streaming approach that we could never do with the print publishing schedule: have a conversation. If you can put together a well-written article in response to something we’ve published, there’s a good chance we’ll find a place for it — no need to wait for next month’s issue, or the limited space on the letters page. It’s time for the research and technical literature to put the issues and the priorities back together again, and focus on fostering the kind of vibrant, living community dialogue it was always meant to provide.