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Latin American journal of sedimentology and basin analysis

On-line version ISSN 1851-4979

Lat. Am. j. sedimentol. basin anal. vol.19 no.1 La Plata Jan./June 2012

 

Editorial

 

Three full years have passed since we took charge of the editorial team of the Latin American Journal of Sedimentology and Basin Analysis (LAJSBA). In July 2009 we set up a few objectives for the shortterm future of the journal and several things have happened since that we want to share with the community in order to analyse the future of LAJSBA. This inscribes not just in the relatively small universe in which the journal has impact but also in a fastevolving subject of scientific publications.
Three year ago we set four main aims for the relatively near future of LAJSBA regarding the quality and visibility of the journal, the efficiency of the editorial process and the overall growth of what still is a relatively small journal (Veiga and Tripaldi, 2009).
Above all, we wanted to honour the spirit and original objectives of the AAS Revista/LAJSBA by preserving the scientific quality and relevance of the work published in the journal. We think we have maintained these standards and of course we must thank the whole community, especially authors and reviewers, who have worked together in order to provide the LAJSBA with quality work that have been cited worldwide. Also regarding the quality of LAJSBA, in 2010 we managed to renew its inclusion in the Núcleo Básico de Revistas Científicas Argentinas set by the CAICYT-CONICET (until 2013) obtaining the maximum qualification that it is awarded to Argentinean scientific publications. This is a certification of the overall excellence of the journal and we expect to keep on meeting the requirements in future presentations. We defined this as the milestone from which we could start building a better LAJSBA, and we are grateful that we have had a lot of help from the whole community in accomplishing this.
One of the main objectives that we set some year ago was to increase the visibility of the journal by adding it to a series of reference services and promoting the journal within the Latin American community. This comes in hand with the decision of adopting an Open Access policy for the journal, making the published contents available for the whole community through the SciELO portal. Regarding this issue, we successfully applied to for including the LAJSBA into the GeoRef service while last month we were notified that it has been also accepted for the addition in the Scopus Database in the near future. This will considerably increase the visibility of the journal and will eventually help persuading authors to submit their work to the journal, besides being also a measure of the quality of the journal, which matches the criteria required to be included in these internationally recognised databases. Even when there are no exact statistics to measure the visibility of the LAJSBA, some numbers show that we are on the right track. Usage statistics of the SciELO site show that some articles published in LAJSBA have been downloaded over 2000 times in the past couple of years (10 times the numbers of the distribution of the printed version) and from countries in the five continents. This is definitively a step forward in the process of making the LAJSBA a regional/international journal.
Increasing the efficiency of the editorial process was another important aspect that might eventually impact in the decision-making process of authors submitting their work to LAJSBA. It has also impact in the nature and quality of the work that editors and reviewers have to do and we thought the journal deserved a refurbish in that aspect. The adopted Open Journal System (OJS), thanks to the worthwhile help of the CAICYT-CONICET has demonstrated very efficient and now that all the MS are being processed through this system we can see the effect, especially in reducing considerably the length of the editorial process, at least until the first editorial decision, which is the most reliable parameter. The implementation of the OJS through the PPCT (Portal de Publicaciones Científicas y Técnicas) of the CAICYT-CONICET has also the advantage of providing another platform for the visibility of the journal, as published issues are available online in this website immediately after publication, while it provides access also to previous volumes of the LAJSBA.
Unfortunately, not all are good news in the evolution of LAJSBA, and even when we have made some progress in many aspects we still need to focus on the attraction of new contributions. The rate of MS submission and the rate of rejection have remained relatively constant in the past few years showing that the adopted policies are not sufficient to guarantee a sustained growth for the journal. We know is a circular reasoning and we do not have enough papers to grow because we are not a big journal and authors usually favour other means to publish their work. However, considering the observed increase in its visibility and as we pointed three years ago, we encourage authors to submit their MS to the Latin American Journal of Sedimentology and Basin Analysis, persuaded that it is a recognized, high-quality journal for exposing their scientific works and hope in the near future we, together, can build a better and bigger journal.


Gonzalo D. Veiga


Alfonsina Tripaldi

Editor
Associate Editor

REFERENCES

1. Veiga, G.D. and A. Tripaldi, 2009. Editorial. Latin American Journal of Sedimentology and Basin Analysis 16:1-2.         [ Links ]

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