The 2015 “State of the Journal” report

Software and Systems Modeling, Jan 2016

Geri Georg, Jeff Gray, Bernhard Rumpe, Martin Schindler

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The 2015 “State of the Journal” report

Softw Syst Model Geri Georg 0 1 2 3 Jeff Gray 0 1 2 3 Bernhard Rumpe 0 1 2 3 Martin Schindler 0 1 2 3 0 Martin Schindler 1 RWTH Aachen University , Aachen , Germany 2 University of Alabama , Tuscaloosa, AL , USA 3 Colorado State University , Fort Collins, CO , USA - There were 198 submissions to SoSyM during the 2015 calendar year. The submissions included 147 regular papers, 12 special section papers, 36 theme section papers, 2 industry voice submissions, and 1 overview submission. The acceptance rate over the past 12 months has been 21.8 %. There were 21 desk rejects (all from regular submissions), which were returned within 4 days of submission. The average time to final decision (accept and reject) was 145 days. The past year of SoSyM has been characterized by several changes. We are still very sad about the loss of our dear friend Robert France in February 2015, who was the founder of SoSyM and remained the SoSyM Editor-In-Chief until his passing. Jeff Gray started the demanding job as new Editor-In-Chief for SoSyM in April. Several Editors completed their term of service (Jeff Offutt and Franck Barbier) - we appreciate their help! We also were excited to announce that Timothy Lethbridge was added to the Editorial Board in 2015, joining our other new Editors, Esther Guerra and Yves Le Traon, who started their Editorial Board service in late 2014. Throughout the 2015 publication cycle, numerous actions were defined and completed as a result of discussions at the 2014 Editorial Board meeting held at MODELS 2014 in Valencia. SoSyM established several new awards, which were presented at MODELS 2015. For the first time, a journal-first option was available in collaboration with MODELS. These two new activities are reported in more detail in the next sections. An effort was also initiated to extend the SoSyM advertisement strategy to make SoSyM more aware to younger researchers and to solicit excellent papers for future submission. Specific actions include the following: a new flyer that can be found at http://www.sosym.org/ SoSyM-flyer.pdf. a new social media presence to distribute announcements of papers and encourage community discussions is being initiated and will be described in the next issue. updates to SoSyM’s “Aims And Scope” to include new areas of interest (see http://www.sosym.org/, as well as the cover of the printed issue in your hands). 1 SoSyM’s 8-year most influential paper awards Awards are an excellent mechanism to recognize and honor the good work of past authors, while also providing an incentive for future authors to write and submit their papers to SoSyM. At MODELS 2015, SoSyM decided to give two awards for the most influential papers of the last 2ˆ3 years. The selection was based on the ISI citation index among papers published in SoSyM from 2007 to 2014. The 8-year most influential regular paper award was given to the following authors: Anne Immonen and Eila Niemelä. Survey of reliability and availability prediction methods from the viewpoint of software architecture. In: Journal on Software and Systems Modeling (SoSyM), Volume 7, Issue 1, pp. 49–65, Springer, February 2008. It is worth noting that this paper was a survey paper, which SoSyM strongly encourages. The authors identified methods for reliability and availability prediction, together with their shortcomings. They defined a comparison framework that encodes the required characteristics of analysis methods from context, user, method content and evaluation perspectives, which can be used to inform the selection of the best suitable method for architectural analysis. The 8-year most influential theme section paper award was given to the following authors: Tom Mens, Gabriele Taentzer, and Olga Runge. Analysing refactoring dependencies using graph transformation. In: Journal on Software and Systems Modeling (SoSyM), Volume 6, Issue 3, pp. 269–285, Springer, September 2007. This article focuses on the formal foundations of software refactoring through the use of graph transformations. Although graph transformations have been used frequently for formalizing refactorings, the authors considered the problem at a higher level of granularity. The article uses the formal technique of critical pair analysis, encoded in the AGG graph transformation tool, for analyzing transformation dependencies and to incrementally resolve model inconsistencies. The tool is also implemented using the Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF). The 2015 MODELS conference in Ottawa was a great venue to announce these two awards and we hope to make this an annual award at future MODELS conferences. More information about the awards can be found at: http://www. sosym.org/awards/. 2 SoSyM’s journal-first papers at MODELS 2015 SoSyM is honored and excited that the MODELS 2015 conference hosted the inaugural journal-first papers that were presented in a special conference session. This initiative enables authors of SoSyM articles that have not been pres (...truncated)


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Geri Georg, Jeff Gray, Bernhard Rumpe, Martin Schindler. The 2015 “State of the Journal” report, Software and Systems Modeling, 2016, pp. 1-4, Volume 15, Issue 1, DOI: 10.1007/s10270-016-0515-3