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
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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)