BA publication announcement

["Dani Gamerman" <dani@im.ufrj.br>]

> ---------------------------------------------------------
> Bayesian Analysis and Electronic Publication
> 
> The International Society for Bayesian Analysis (ISBA)
> plans to launch its new journal Bayesian Analysis
> on August 1. The appearance of this journal 
> should be of interest both to people who study and
> use Bayesian statistical methods, and to those who are
> concerned with electronic publication of journals.
> Bayesian Analysis is electronic and freely
> available at http://ba.stat.cmu.edu. 
> It is dedicated to rapid editorial turnaround and publication 
> of manuscripts. Its founding editors are  Alicia Carriquiry, 
> Phil Dawid, David Heckerman, Xiao-Li Meng, Christian Robert, 
> Fabrizio Ruggeri, and Dalene Stangl, with Michael Jordan 
> joining the board later this year.
> 
> Content of the Journal
> 
> Bayesian Analysis seeks to publish a wide range of articles that
> demonstrate or discuss Bayesian methods in some theoretical or 
> applied context. The journal welcomes submissions involving 
> presentation of new computational and statistical methods; reviews,
>  criticism, and discussion of existing approaches; historical 
> perspectives; description of important scientific or policy 
> application areas; case studies; and methods for experimental design,
>  data collection, data sharing, or data mining. Evaluation of 
> submissions will be based on importance of content and effectiveness 
> of communication. Some general stylistic recommendations are 
> provided on the submission web page. We currently anticipate the 
> following articles will appear in the first issue:
> 
> * S. Fienberg, ``When Did Bayesian Inference Become `Bayesian'?"
> 
> * A. Gelfand, J. Silander, S. Wu, A. Latimer, P. Lewis, A.
>   Rebelo and M. Holder, ``Explaining Species Distribution Patterns Through
>   Hierarchical Modeling," with commentary by J. Hoeting and J. VerHoef.
> 
> * J. Andrade and A. O'Hagan,
>   ``Bayesian robustness modelling using regularly varying distributions."
> 
> * D. Blei and M. Jordan, ``Variational inference for Dirichlet 
> process  mixtures."
> 
> * C. Holmes and L. Held, ``Bayesian auxiliary variable models
>   for binary and multinomial regression."
> 
> * L. House, M. Clyde and Y. Huang, ``Bayesian Identification of
>   Differential Gene Expression Induced by Metals in Human Bronchial 
Epithelial
>   Cells."
> 
> Electronic Publication and Responsive Refereeing
> 
> Slow refereeing has been a chronic problem in statistics.
> As Carroll (2001, Biometrics, 57: 1-6) has argued,
> fixing this requires a fundamental change in attitude.
> {\em Bayesian Analysis} is attempting to force some
> degree of change by (1) using a large board of editors and 
> associate editors who are committed to handling papers
> reasonably quickly, (2) creating an electronic 
> manuscript-handling system that
> both reduces book-keeping overhead for editors and 
> allows them to track progress easily; and
> (3) putting in place some oversight
> procedures devoted specifically to identifying and handling bad
> situations. A reasonable goal is to provide reports to 
> authors within 10 weeks of submssion on at least 80\% of articles
> submitted. We have achieved this goal for the approximately 50
> papers handled to date.
> 
> A key component of the process is our manuscript-handling system, 
> which was designed to reduce the organizational effort 
> required of editors and associate editors and, in addition, 
> relieve the editorial assistant from most of these chores as well 
> (thereby reducing the assistant's job to only a 
> few hours per week, and making the cost 
> of running the journal very small). Because ISBA is a small society, 
> we could not afford a commercial system with the 
> characteristics we envisioned. We therefore decided to 
> create our own. Written in PHP/MySQL, 
> and constructed with supervisory 
> advice from our Electronic Production Manager Pantelis Vlachos,
> the system has the following features:
> 
> * Articles are submitted in pdf format and are accessible 
>   to relevant referees and editorial board members 
>   on the system web site.
> 
> * Articles are tracked by a unique article reference number, 
>   and authors may use this number to check on the status of 
>   a submitted article.
> 
> * Editors, AEs and referees may view a list of the articles 
>   assigned to them, and may then examine the history and current 
>   status of any of these articles.
> 
> * Editors have access to an editorial load monitor
>   so that AEs can be picked taking account
>   of load over the past 12 months.
> 
> * When an editor, AE, or referee does not respond quickly
>   the system automatically sends an email reminder, 
>   with a copy sent to the editor and/or AE and also
>   to a managing editor in charge of identifying delinquency.
> 
> * Letters to authors are composed by Editors, checked by the 
>   Editor-in-Chief, and sent to authors using the system. They are 
>   then archived by the system and are accessible to relevant 
>   past and future reviewers.
> 
> * The system allows editors, AEs, and referees to compose messages 
>   for other users of the system and archives all such 
> correspondence.    This is intended to help with organization of all 
> internal email   discussion concerning an article.
> 
> * The system maintains logs of all editorial activities related 
>   to each article.
> 
> * We expect publication on the website 
>   to occur with minimal delay (on the order of 1 day)
>   once the authors have submitted
>   their final, corrected article in latex, with figures in 
> postscript.
> 
> We intend to make this system available to others who wish to 
> do their own editing and publishing on the web.
> 
> Rob Kass
> Editor-in-Chief
> Bayesian Analysis


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Dani Gamerman
Coord de PG em Estatistica - IM/UFRJ
Caixa Postal 68530
21945-970 Rio de Janeiro, RJ
tel (21) 2562 7911
fax (21) 2562 7374
dani@im.ufrj.br
http://acd.ufrj.br/~dani
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