STVR Policy on Special Issues
Special issues are valuable to a journal, but it is important that
the qualitative differences between conference and journal papers be maintained.
It is easy to invite papers that look good in a conference but do not really translate to a journal paper.
It is also easy to recommend good changes to an invited paper,
but if the authors do not make the changes it becomes a little awkward.
Benefits of Conference-Based Special Issues
- More good papers are submitted to the journal
- Great publicity through the conference itself
- More buy-in from the community
- Targeted publicity to conference authors and attendees
- A chance to involve a segment of the community
- Future increase in papers on the topic
- Increase in quality—conference papers were already reviewed,
only the best are invited, then they are improved
- Shorter time to publication—papers are assumed to have good ideas
STVR Editorial Policy on Special Issues
- All special issue proposals must be approved by the editor-in-chief and the publisher.
- Calls for papers must be approved by the editor-in-chief before being disseminated.
- Special issues can be based on a topic or a conference.
- At least one of the special issue editors must be a member of the STVR Editorial Board.
- Submissions to a special issue must be submitted through the regular online submission system
(http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/stvr),
marked as a special issue paper.
- Invited papers are de-facto considered to be in the category of a “major revision,”
and the revisions will be reviewed.
- For submissions based on a prior conference paper:
- Submission must be at least 30% different from the original paper.
- Submission must include the prior paper and a summary of extensions and differences.
- The journal submission must cite the conference version and summarize the differences in the introduction. (added May 2016)
- At least one reviewer should be someone who was not associated with the conference.
- Authors submitting to special issues should usually not review each other’s papers.
- If a submission to a special issue cannot be accepted with its “cohort” in time for the special issue,
it can stay in the STVR submission process as a regular paper submission.
Jeff Offutt
STVR EiC
March 2009