Improving Timeliness and Visibility in Publishing Software Engineering Research

WE believe that the role of TSE is to serve and connect the growing international community of software engineering researchers and practitioners. The TSE editorial board has continued to uphold the high standard of quality that has been a hallmark of the journal since its inception. In addition, we have worked in a number of areas to provide more timely and more visible content for the community. Timeliness. In 2015 we instituted certain paper review practices and this has led to a reduction in the time it takes to reach a decision and to publish accepted manuscripts. Specifically, the average number of days from submission of a manuscript to TSE until a final decision is sent to the authors has been reduced from 144 in 2014 to 98 in 2016. This represents a more than 6 week reduction in review time and brings the average time in review for TSE to just over 3 months. Review time varies of course, depending on whether a paper is rejected on first review or goes through major revisions, so the average is only part of the story. Our new practices have also reduced the time it takes from original submission to when the electronic version of an accepted manuscript is published. In 2014 this took, on average, 365 days, but we were able to reduce that by over 16 weeks to 250 days in 2016. The upshot is that, on average, accepted TSEmanuscripts now appear online in just over 8 months. These improvements have been a team effort and we would like to thank John Grundy and Christine Shaughnessy, who worked with the editorial board to develop and implement strategies for improving the timeliness of TSE reviewing. The editorial board, and the community of reviewers, also deserves thanks for their part in implementing the new review practices. We believe that these efforts have maintained review quality. Evidence of this can be found in the fact that the TSE acceptance rate is the same, at 21.6%, in 2016 as it was in 2014, and the number of papers for which authors have questioned the review outcomes has decreased. We received feedback about review outcomes for 5 papers in 2014, 0.9% of submissions, and for 4 papers in 2016, 0.6% of submissions. Our goal is to continue to perform the highest-quality review, but to make sure that we expedite the review process so that results get out to the community as soon as possible. We believe that this is especially important as we continue to develop the journal-first publication model at TSE (more on that below). Visibility. The TSE editorial board has taken a leadership role in helping to establish a journal-first publication model for the software engineering research community. TSE established a journal-first paper category in January of 2016 and piloted journal-first publication in 2015 and 2016 in partnership with TOSEM, ESE, ICSE, FSE, and ESEC/FSE. We have now established a multi-year agreement with ICSE to present TSE papers at the conference. The details of how TSE content flows to ICSE are described on the journal web site: https://www.computer.org/web/tse/author The development and implementation of journal-first publication for the software engineering community has been a team effort and we would like to thank all of our partners at TOSEM, ESE, ICSE, FSE, and ESEC/FSE, and especially Jane Cleland-Huang, who has supported these efforts as a TSE representative. There is reason to believe that this approach has value for the software engineering research community. In 2016, TSE received 216 journal-first manuscripts and 208 regular manuscripts; combined this represents an increase of almost 20 percent in submissions over 2015, with a majority pursuing journal-first publication. The organizers of ICSE 2017 extended 26 invitations to authors of TSE papers to present at the conference and with 21 accepting there will be a substantial body of TSE work presented this May in Buenos Aires. The journal-first process for ESEC/FSE 2017 is underway, so there will be even more opportunity to increase the visibility of TSE contributions going forward. In January of 2016 we created a Facebook community for TSE: https://www.facebook.com/ieeetse/. Throughout the year we flowed information about accepted and featured papers to that page. The TSE Facebook presence is about to get much more interesting, however, since in January of 2017 we named Mei Nagappan the TSE “Information Director.”