Quality Assurance in the ETAI Review Procedure

The present page is intended for anyone who is charged with assessing the quality and merit value of an ETAI published article, for example members of academic promotion committees and officials of research funding agencies. The basic question is: how does an ETAI published article compare with an article published elsewhere?

The following observations may be useful for your decision.

ETAI articles are properly published

The term "electronic" in our name does not mean that articles are only placed on someone's web page and that they can later be changed at random. ETAI articles are published both on paper and electronically, and the electronic versions are subject to a strict set of rules and safety measures to insure that they will remain on-line for an extended period of time, and that they can not be tampered with. The graphical appearance is similar to what you find in any other serious journal.

The term "electronic" for us just indicates that most users will download articles from the net rather than subscribe to physical journal issues from the publisher.

ETAI quality control is more thorough than elsewhere

In order to be accepted to the ETAI, an article has to go through two controls:

Open reviewing during three months, where the article is advertised to the community of researchers in its specialized area, and a public, on-line discussion is organized about its contents.
Confidential refereeing after the open reviewing period has concluded. Here, leading researchers in the specialized area of the article weigh the article as well as the review discussion and decide whether or not to accept the article.

The identity of the referees is confidential, but the review discussion is done openly. Organizing the quality control in this way serves several important purposes:

More feedback to the author.
More reliable checks that previous work has been correctly cited, and that the reported results had not been previously published.
More encouragement to reviewers who contribute actively to the improvement of the article.
Better controls against reviewers/referees who mistakenly reject a valuable article.
Discourages authors from submitting low-quality articles. (In an ordinary journal, noone gets to know if you submitted a rejected article, so it is easy to take chances).

For these reasons, we claim that ETAI's quality control method is superior to the one used in ordinary journals.

More meta-information available in ETAI

The public review discussion used by ETAI is retained and kept on-line even after the acceptance decision has been made. This is important when the merit value of the article is to be assessed, since it makes it possible to do a more precise evaluation than just looking at the title of the journal.

Consider this: If an article has been published in a conventional journal or conference proceedings, then the only information that you can effectively use is the title of the journal and the full text of the article. Given that you won't be able to read all the submitted articles, you can only go by the journal's prestige. We all know that this is a very crude measure of the article's quality, but often it is the only information you have.

If the article has been accepted by the ETAI, however, you are welcome to check the discussion that preceded acceptance. It may contain questions, critical comments and encouraging comments by colleagues, but also the answers by the author(s). The protocol of this discussion will allow you, with minimal effort, to get an idea of how the article was received by the peers.

"But newly started journals need some years to build up quality..."

Yes, for paper journals, because they need to fill their annual quota of a certain number of published pages. In the ETAI, on the other hand, we don't have that constraint since it is made available free of charge over the net. Therefore, we have no reason whatever to compromise quality in order to fill the year's volume. (At the same time, we don't have to maintain a queue of papers awaiting publication - every paper goes into the ETAI as soon as it is accepted).

Who publishes in the ETAI?

Allow us to make one more observation, for the particular case that you are considering an academic promotion. Most likely, you are not only looking for the candidate with the longest list of publications, but also for the candidate with the best potential for continued research. Now, if a young researcher has published articles in the ETAI, what does that say about her or him? We suggest that the candidate is then likely to have the following characteristics:

Likes to try new ideas. The ETAI is an entirely new way of doing scientific publication.
Likes to communicate. The most important difference between being an author in the ETAI and being an author elsewhere is that as an ETAI author you have to interact with colleagues.
Not afraid of debate. After all, if you submit your article to the ETAI, it just may happen that someone comes up with a strong criticism, you have to answer it, and the whole world is watching.
Research interest and curiosity more important than collecting credit points. After all, who knows how future promotion committees will rate ETAI published articles... but this author chose the ETAI anyway, because he or she liked the concept.

If this is the kind of person you would like to recruit, then having published articles in the ETAI must count in favor of this candidate.

The ECCAI system for specialized research publication. Accepted for the ECCAI board in January, 1997, as the policy document for the ETAI and its relation to the AICOM.

Publishing and Reviewing in the ETAI.
This article uses one concrete example for describing how publishing, reviewing, and refereeing works in the ETAI. It was included as an editorial note in ETAI's first issue. [In postscript].

The production of the electronic and paper issues of the ETAI publication.
At present, this is a link to the page of accumulated contents of ETAI with accepted articles so far. (An additional page with explanation of the practical routines for this is to be added here).