New open access journal on visualization and interaction

This is Jessica. I am on the advisory board of an open access visualization research journal called the Journal of Visualization and Interaction (JoVI), recently launched by Lonni Besançon, Florian Echtler, Matt Kay, and Chat Wacharamanotham. From their website:

The Journal of Visualization and Interaction (JoVI) is a venue for publishing scholarly work related to the fields of visualization and human-computer interaction. Contributions to the journal include research in:

  • how people understand and interact with information and technology,
  • innovations in interaction techniques, interactive systems, or tools,
  • systematic literature reviews,
  • replication studies or reinterpretations of existing work,
  • and commentary on existing publications.

One component of their mission is to require materials to be open by default, including exposing all data and reasoning for scrutiny, and making all code reproducible “within a reasonable effort.” Other goals are to emphasize knowledge and discourage rejection based on novelty concerns (a topic that comes up often in computer science research, see e..g., my thoughts here). They welcome registered reports, and say they will not impose top down constraints on how many papers can be published that can lead to arbitrary-seeming decisions on papers that hinge on easily fixable mistakes. This last part makes me think they are trying to avoid the kind of constrained decision processes of conference proceeding publications, which are still the most common publication mode in computer science. There are existing journals like Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics that give authors more chances to go back and forth with reviewers, and my experience as associate editor there is that papers don’t really get rejected for easily fixable flaws. Part of JoVI’s mission seems to be about changing the kind of attitude that reviewers might bring, away from one of looking for reasons to reject and toward trying to work with the authors to make the paper as good as possible. If they can do this while also avoiding some of the other CS review system problems like lack of attention or sufficient background knowledge of reviewers, perhaps the papers will end up being better than what we currently see in visualization venues. 

This part of JoVI’s mission distinguishes it from other visualization journals:

Open review, comments, and continued conversation

All submitted work, reviews, and discussions will by default be publicly available for other researchers to use. To encourage accountability, editors’ names are listed on the articles they accept, and reviewers may choose to be named or anonymous . All submissions and their accompanying reviews and discussions remain accessible whether or not an article is accepted. To foster discussions that go beyond the initial reviewer/author exchanges, we welcome post-publication commentaries on articles.

Open review is so helpful for adding context to how papers were received at the time of submission, so I hope it catches on here. Plus I really dislike by the attitude that it is somehow unfair to bring up problems with published work, at least outside of the accepted max 5 minutes of public QA that happens after the work is presented at a conference. People talk amongst themselves about what they perceive the quality or significance of new contributions to be, but many of the criticisms remain in private circles. It will be interesting to see if JoVI gets some commentaries or discussion on published articles, and what they are like. 

This part is also interesting: “On an alternate, optional submission track, we will continually experiment with new article formats (including modern, interactive formats), new review processes, and articles as living documents. This experimentation will be motivated by re-conceptualizing peer review as a humane, constructive process aimed at improving work rather than gatekeeping.” 

distll.pub is no longer publishing new stuff but some of their interactive ML articles were very memorable and probably had more impact than more conventionally published papers on the topic. Even more so I like the idea of trying to support articles as living documents that can continue to be updated. The current publication practices in visualization seem a long way from encouraging a process where it’s normal to first release working papers. Instead, people spend six months building their interactive system or doing their small study to get a paper-size unit of work, and then they move on. I associate the areas where working papers seem to thrive (e.g., theoretical or behavioral econ) with theorizing or trying to conceptualize something fundamental to behavior, rather than just describing or implementing something. The idea that we should be trying to write visualization papers that really make us think hard over longer periods, and that may not come in easily bite-size chunks, seems kind of foreign to how the research is conceptualized. But any steps toward thinking about papers as incomplete or imperfect, and building more feedback and iteration into the process, are welcome.

3 thoughts on “New open access journal on visualization and interaction

  1. Jessica:

    Cool! I’ll have to submit a paper there. The challenge will be finding something I’m working on in this area that I’m not already collaborating on with anyone on the advisory board of the journal.

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