The Acceptance Decision for Your Article

Based on the referees' reports, the Area Editor decides whether to accept or to decline the submitted article. The decision is made openly in either case, and declined articles continue to be visible. We are very careful, of course, to make sure that this happens without undue loss of face. If an article is declined, quite possibly it is because its topic does not correspond to what ETAI wishes to publish, and it does not necessarily imply that the article is "bad". We don't believe there exists a one-dimensional scale of goodness for research articles. Also, "bad" articles are less likely to have been submitted to the ETAI in the first place, exactly because of this open review procedure.

For us, the ideal would be to have a hundred percent acceptance rate, because it would mean that all the submitted articles were good ones. However, since we are not bound to a particular size per volume (an electronic edition is completely elastic...), we will never feel obliged to lower our standards to fill a given number of pages, nor will publication of an article be delayed because there is a backlog.

What happens after an article has been accepted

First, if there have been comments from the confidential referees, the author may wish to revise the paper based on those comments.

Second, it must be arranged that the article is or is put in ETAI standard style, using the Latex style definition. Please click the item for "Formatting" for additional details. We prefer of course if the author does this, but we can usually provide help from the ETAI secretariat, especially if the article is originally in a form other than Latex.

The ETAI secretariat needs to have the article in the following forms:

Latex original
Postscript generated from the Latex
Abstract in plaintext or HTML
Summary in plaintext, HTML, or Latex

Using this, it will generate a file for the body of the article in the form required for a segment of the ETAI (please compare the ETAI Journal pages to see what it looks like in finished form) as well as the introductory pages containing abstract, review history, etc.

The article's appearance in the Journal

The ETAI is published with four issues per year, one issue every three months. The accepted article is included in the ETAI issue corresponding to its datestamp, that is, the date when the article was submitted, unless it has later been revised with respect to the reported results. Within the issue, the articles are included in the order that they are accepted. This procedure has several important consequences:

The official date of publication of an article is not affected by possible publication delays. The date of publication reflects when the results were first made available to the peer community. This is as it ought to be, for priority purposes. It provides the best protection for the authors, without creating an undue rush in the reviewing which might jeopardize quality.
The exact citation of an article is determined immediately when it has been accepted, including the assignment of page numbers. At each point in time, the ETAI webpage can therefore contain the partial contents of the present ETAI issue, namely those contents that have been accepted so far.
There is never any backlog whereby articles are delayed for publication in order to wait their turn. If we have more accepted articles, we publish a bigger volume - that's all there is to it.

Latest update: 9.2.1999; Position code: C.etai.authors.accept.