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  • 1.  arXiv.org and peer-reviewed journal submission

    Posted 10-08-2024 06:46

    This is an open question to see if anyone has encountered the following problem. As a background, I am an astronomer who also publishes, occasionally, in applied statistics journals.

    I have a paper submitted to the Journal of the Indian Society for Probability and Statistics (JISP), a journal managed by Springer. After two rounds of peer-review, I received an email saying that they were ready to accept the paper, but there was a high "similarity score" with another paper, and therefore I had to address that issue. After repeated requests for explanation, the journal indicated that the offending paper was one on arXiv.org; which was not a surprise to me, since I had posted an earlier pre-print, while waiting for acceptance. After more than a month of back-and-forth email exchanges with the Springer editorial assistant, I still haven't been able to communicate to the editorial board that it is common practice to use the arXiv for preprints (especially for astronomers). The journal also does not somehow allow direct communications with the handling editor directly, which I thought would be common practice. So my questions are: Is the use of arXiv also common among statisticians proper? Does ASA support its use? (Of course it is irrelevant to JISP, which is not an ASA journal, but I am curious to understand the situation.)



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    Massimiliano Bonamente
    Professor
    University of Alabama in Huntsville
    bonamem@uah.edu
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  • 2.  RE: arXiv.org and peer-reviewed journal submission

    Posted 10-09-2024 10:00

    Hi Massimiliano:

    Pre-prints started out in the hard sciences like physics.  However, they are becoming more common for statistics.
    Not sure what the ASA's policy is.  But I haven't seen a statistical journal complain about pre-prints.  JISP seems
    to be an outlier in this regard.



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    Rodney Sparapani, Associate Professor of Biostatistics
    President for the Wisconsin Chapter of the ASA
    Data Science Institute, Division of Biostatistics
    Medical College of Wisconsin, Milwaukee Campus
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  • 3.  RE: arXiv.org and peer-reviewed journal submission

    Posted 10-10-2024 08:02

    Hi all, I am Eric Sampson, the ASA's journals manager. The ASA's policy on preprints is straightforward. Authors are welcome to post the submitted versions (prior to peer review) of their manuscripts to a publicly available repository (i.e., arXiv or similar) at any time. When our team does its plagiarism check, these arXiv papers are always the first results that pop up.

    If the paper is accepted, then authors are welcome to post the revised version of their paper 12 months after it appears in an issue. Of course we appreciate a link to the Version of Record and proper citation with the paper's DOI.

    Publication in a conference proceedings (refereed or not) does not preclude publication in an ASA journal. ASA Journals have always operated under the policy that a paper published in the ASA Proceedings may be submitted to an ASA journal with few or no changes and that policy will continue. ASA journals are also receptive to publishing papers that have appeared in non-ASA proceedings. For non-ASA proceedings papers it is expected that the journal submission will be a more substantial and complete piece of research than the original conference proceedings paper as fitting the target ASA journal. The journal submission should have new content, be written for a statistical audience, and not violate copyright. 

    You can find a lot more information on each journal's Instructions for Authors. Of course, ASA members have free online access to all ASA-owned journals (every volume, every issue), as well as many more titles from our publishing partner Taylor and Francis. I also encourage you to create an account on the submission site of any journal in which you are interested. This automatically makes you eligible to review papers for that journal and the ASA would be extremely grateful for your help! When setting up your account, please be sure to be as complete as possible about your areas of interest so our Editors can route the best-suited papers your way.

    As always, if you have any questions regarding the journals, the peer-review process, the submission process etc, just let me know, Eric



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    Eric Sampson, ASA Journals Manager, eric@amstat.org
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  • 4.  RE: arXiv.org and peer-reviewed journal submission

    Posted 10-10-2024 12:59

    It is standard practice in most journals (including ASA's) that posting something on a preprint server (such as arxiv) does NOT count as prepublication and should not jeopardize its review for a refereed publication. It JISP has a different policy they are definitely an outlier. From the way you describe your interactions with the journal, my guess is that JISP probably has the same policy as everybody else but you somehow got to interact with a staff member who is not aware of the policy.



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    Richard Smith
    University of North Carolina
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