Status Report on The VLDB Journal

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Status Report on The VLDB Journal
VLDB 2005 PanelDatabase Publication Practices

• Kyu-Young Whang

Jointly prepared by Tamer Özsu, Andreas Heuer,
and Holger Meyer
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Editorial Board

• Current Editors-in-Chief
• M. Tamer Özsu (coordinating EIC)
• Elisa Bertino
• Kyu-Young Whang
• New editors-in-chief
• Elisa Bertino (new coordinating EIC)
• Klaus Dittrich (a new EIC)
• Kyu-Young Whang
• 36 editors - Americas 16, Europe 13, Asia 7
• Tenure is 6 years. 1/3 retire every two years
• Topical coverage, in particular in emerging
  areas, is considered

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Editorial Board (contd)

• New editors
• Americas (4)
• Guy Lohman (IBM Almaden), David Toman (Univ.
  Waterloo), K. Selcuk Candan (ASU), Daniela
  Florescu (Oracle)
• Asia (2)
• Dimitris Papadias (HKUST), Ramamohanarao Kotagiri
  (Univ. Melbourne)
• Europe (5)
• Klemens Böhm (Univ. Karlsruhe), Norman Paton
  (Univ. Manchester), Wolfgang Lehner (TU Dresden),
  Tova Milo (Tel Aviv Univ.) Tiziana Catarci (Univ.
  Rome)

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Special Issues

• VLDB Conference special issue
• Around six best papers per year from the VLDB
  conference
• Thematic issue
• 2005 Data Management, Analysis and Mining for
  the Life Sciences (4/21)
• Terry Gaasterland, H.V. Jagadish and Louiqa
  Raschid

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Special Issues (contd)

• Earlier thematic issues
• 2004 Stream Data Management (5/23/2)
• Joseph Hellerstein and Johannes Gehrke
• 2003 Semantic Web (6/20/4)
• Yelena Yesha, Vijay Atluri, Anupam Joshi
• 2002 XML data management (6/25)
• Alon Halevy and Peter Fankhauser
• 2001 E-services (7/19)
• Fabio Casati, Dimitrios Georgakopuolos,
  Ming-Chien Shan
• 2000 Database support for the Web (5/14)
• Paolo Atzeni and Alberto Mendelzon
• 1998 Multimedia (6/33)
• M. Tamer Özsu and Stavros Christodoulakis

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Partnership with ACM

• Started in January 2003
• ACM provides the full-text of the VLDB Journal to
  subscribers of the ACM Portal/Digital Library
• ACM markets the VLDB Journal to its members at a
  price comparable to ACMs own journals

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Journal Statistics
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1st Round Turnaround Time and Overall Turnaround
Time 1)
(months)
1) Measured for all rounds that were initiated in
a given year (i.e., for both original
submissions and revisions)
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Acceptance Time 2)
(months)
2) Time from initial submission to accept decision
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End-to-End Time 3)
3) Time from initial submission to publication
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Number of Submissions
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Acceptance Rate 4)
4) Percentage of those manuscripts submitted that
year that were ultimately accepted
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Number of Articles per Year
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Subscriptions
333
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Paper Downloads (full-text)
52,582
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How do we do?

• Quality
• Has the highest impact in ISI citation index
  ranking in the category of Computer Science,
  Information Systems
• VLDB J.(4.545), TOIS(3.533), Information
  Systems(3.327), TODS(1.957), TKDE(1.223), etc.
• Erhard Rahms study shows significant increase in
  references after 2000
• The paper downloads have increased substantially

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How do we do? (contd)

• Review process
• Review times are still long, with significant
  variability
• We are trying hard to shorten it
• Accessibility
• Presence in ACM Digital Library helps enhance
  accessibility

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Discussion Point
Journals vs. Conferences
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Conferences

• Fast dissemination is the biggest merit
• We are concerned about papers being lost in the
  noise
• (Good papers are rejected)
• But, we also have to worry about
  incomplete/incorrect papers being accepted (Bad
  papers are accepted)
• Papers claim fancy things, but there is
  insufficient or faulty proof that they work
  experiments are not credible
• This problem is becoming more serious as the
  review quality of the papers is degrading
• ? Problems Many papers tend to be incorrect or
  incomplete
• ? Reasons Conferences lack the processes of
• revision and rebuttal

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Journals

• Journals handle these problems more properly by
  interactions between the authors and reviewers
  through a thorough revision process (typically,
  two rounds)
• Authors have good chances to have potentially
  incorrect reviews rectified through a rebuttal
  process
• These processes are essential since correctness
  and completeness are of prime importance for
  archival journals
• Bad side slow dissemination
• By the time you are rejected in two years,
  someone else has published an incomplete version
  of a similar idea in a conference

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Inherent Differences

• Conferences
• fast dissemination
• allowing some immaturity
• Journals
• archival purposes
• requiring correctness and completeness

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Bridging the Gap between Journals and Conferences

• Journals
• Trying to shorten the review time
• On-line availability helping fast dissemination
• Conferences
• Allowing revisions (e.g., rolling over some
  rejected papers to the same referees)
• Allowing rebuttals (e.g., permitting author
  feedback as in SIGMOD 2005)
• ?We are making some progress, but complete merger
  remains a major challenge

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Thank You!
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Number of References 5)
Top five papers
5) Prepared by Erhard Rahm
All papers
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Number of References (contd)
5 year average
10 year average