Status Report on The VLDB Journal Kyu-Young Whang VLDB 2005 Panel Database Publication Practices *Jointly prepared by Tamer Özsu, Andreas Heuer, and Holger Meyer

Status Report on VLDB J. August 31, 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

Status Report on VLDB J. August 31, Editorial Board (cont’d) 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)

Status Report on VLDB J. August 31, 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

Status Report on VLDB J. August 31, Special Issues (cont’d) 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

Status Report on VLDB J. August 31, 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 ACM’s own journals

Journal Statistics

Status Report on VLDB J. August 31, st Round Turnaround Time and Overall Turnaround Time 1) 1) Measured for all rounds that were initiated in a given year (i.e., for both original submissions and revisions) (months)

Status Report on VLDB J. August 31, Acceptance Time 2) 2) Time from initial submission to accept decision (months)

Status Report on VLDB J. August 31, End-to-End Time 3) 3) Time from initial submission to publication

Status Report on VLDB J. August 31, Number of Submissions

Status Report on VLDB J. August 31, Acceptance Rate 4) 4) Percentage of those manuscripts submitted that year that were ultimately accepted

Status Report on VLDB J. August 31, Number of Articles per Year

Status Report on VLDB J. August 31, Subscriptions 333

Status Report on VLDB J. August 31, Paper Downloads (full-text) 52,582

Status Report on VLDB J. August 31, 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 Rahm’s study shows significant increase in references after 2000 The paper downloads have increased substantially

Status Report on VLDB J. August 31, How do we do? (cont’d) 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

Status Report on VLDB J. August 31, Discussion Point Journals vs. Conferences

Status Report on VLDB J. August 31, 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

Status Report on VLDB J. August 31, 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 Journals

Status Report on VLDB J. August 31, Inherent Differences Conferences fast dissemination allowing some immaturity Journals archival purposes requiring correctness and completeness

Status Report on VLDB J. August 31, 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

Thank You!

Status Report on VLDB J. August 31, Top five papers All papers Number of References 5) 5) Prepared by Erhard Rahm

Status Report on VLDB J. August 31, year average 10 year average Number of References (cont’d)