Electronic Transactions on Artificial Intelligence

The Reviewing Process

The reviewing process is the core activity of a scientific journal, electronic or not. The ETAI wishes to make full use of the electronic medium in order to obtain higher quality reviewing as a service to authors and readers alike. The reviewing will therefore be organized in the following, novel way.

Reviewing from the Point of View of the Area Editor

The ETAI addresses a number of distinct research areas, with one area editor for each area. The task of an area editor is to run the review process for contributions within his or her area, including both the open review process (public debate about published papers) and the closed one (confidential review and decision about promotion to approved status). They rely on a common secretariat service which is shared for the ETAI as a whole, whereby proposed contributions are received. (The possible techniques for this is to let users fill in a WWW form page, or to send an E-mail message with a stereotype structure).

On this basis, the base service provides the area editor with a message for each article which has been submitted to his (her) area. The area editor is supposed to screen the article *without going into any details* and decide whether it fits into his area or not. Note: this is only a syntactic check, not a quality control. Basically, it is required that the abstract states some kind of result, and that the claimed result belongs to the area. It is not checked at this point whether the full text of the article materializes the result, or not. Normally, the area editor does not have to look much beyond the abstract.

As the area editor has received the contribution, it goes into the electronic news journal for the area in question. This news journal shall contain both listings of new articles, and debate about current articles. Basically, the area editor is supposed to edit this news journal and produce something readable for the web. The editor is free to give it any appearance he likes, but a certain uniformity will be desirable, and a certain software support will be provided to facilitate the work.

When a paper has been posted in the news journal for a certain period of time, so that the colleagues have had a chance to react to it, it may be considered for acceptance. Alternatively, it is submitted to e.g. the JAIR; one can only submit it to one place at a time, of course. The ETAI should set a fixed time within which it is possible to obtain an acceptance decision; 6 months would be a suitable period.

When an article in his area is submitted for ETAI acceptance, the area editor finds two referees as usual. The referees write their comments based on both the comments during the debate period, and their own observations. This results in a decision whether to accept the article, at which point it is added to a list - the "table of contents" of this area section of the ETAI, if the ETAI is seen as consisting of journal issues.

We aim at using the following timetable, counting from the day when the the article is first made known through the news journal:

After three months (not earlier): the author may request acceptance by ETAI. It is assumed that the same article is not submitted to another journal etc while it is up for acceptance.
At most three months after the author has requested acceptance, the ETAI must make a decision, positive or negative.
This means that if the author requests acceptance on the first possible day, he or she obtains a acceptance decision six months after first appearance.

The role of the area editor in this respect is therefore to find referees and to get them to write a report. Note that wrt the fixed timetable, this resembles conference reviewing more than journal reviewing.

The refereeing criteria are different than in conventional journals in the following ways:

Referees don't have to consider whether the article contains sufficient and correct references. It's up to the original authors of competing references to look after that, and to write in if there is an omission. However, referees do serve to resolve possible disagreements whether something should count as a reference or not.
The electronic publishing medium also makes it possible to "write in" additional references at a later time if the original list is shown to have been incomplete.
Referees are not supposed to evaluate the "value" of the result to the same (sometimes exaggerated) extent as happens in our ordinary journals. They should primarily check that the claims made in the abstract are materialized in the article; their "research taste" should not restrict contributions from being published.
Then, it is up to the reader community to decide whether they are any interested in this result, or not. In particular, it is assumed that the ongoing debate in the news journals and electronic colloquia that are tied to the ETAI will contains expressions of opinion regarding the relevance of results.
Referees are not either required to comment on readability, although they may do so if they wish. Readability complaints are supposed to come from the floor.

With this, it is expected that reviewing will be relatively easy, and that the area editor will not have to "hunt" referees as much as is usually the case.

Acceptance verdicts are reported into the computer system so once the area editor has made up his or her mind about a contribution, the rest is automatic.

Reviewing from the Point of View of the Author

From the point of view of the author and the individual article, this works as follows:

The author(s) write(s) the article, and prepares it in postscript and/or PDF format. It is recommended to use ETAI style files.
An informal contact with the area editor may be appropriate in order to check that the article follows the basic formal criteria.
The author arranges to have the article published in a first publication archive (university E-Press, preprint archive, etc) in such a way that it is identified now and forever with a specific URL.
The article represented by the URL is submitted to the relevant ETAI area for inclusion in a news journal.
The area editor screens it and approves (hopefully) the inclusion of the article.
The article is subjected to open reviewing during at least six months. The author is likely to make changes to the article based on the feedback.
The author decides where he wants to go for acceptance. If she chooses e.g. JAIR or some other place except ETAI, nothing more to do.
If the author submits the article (now probably modified) to for acceptance by the ETAI, then the area editor appoints two referees and gives them a short amount of time to do their job. Then the area editor decides based on the statements of the referees. See above regarding time of submission and time of decision.
Even after ETAI acceptance, the article "hangs around" and may engage additional debate.

Erik Sandewall

21-May-97 15:53