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