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Two major responsibilities of the Publications Board are long-range planning for the journals program and monitoring the journals through editors' reports.
Long-Range Planning
The charge to the Publications Board requires it to engage in long-range planning. The Board must be knowledgeable about the current state of the art in scholarly publishing and the implications of trends and technologies for the ASHA publications program. Equally important, the Board must be cognizant of trends within audiology and speech-language pathology and must be informed about unmet publication needs of the membership.
Monitoring the Scholarly Journals
A principal means by which the Publications Board monitors the scholarly journals is through a review of the editors’ reports. The editors’ reports collate several types of information. The first is manuscript outcome (Accept, Revise, Resubmit, Reject, Pending, and Withdrawn) as a function of associate editor or editor.
The editors’ reports also include acceptance/rejection rates, which permit the Board to identify unusually high or low acceptance/rejection rates and to monitor overall rates of acceptance/rejection. The following formulas are currently used to calculate these rates:
Acceptance rate = (current ms accepted + previous two years' accepted ms) / (current total decisions + previous two years' total decisions)
Rejection rate = (current ms rejected + previous two years' accepted ms) / (current total decisions + previous two years' total decisions).
Also summarized in the editors’ reports is information on processing time (in days) for manuscripts, organized by associate editor (or editor). This information is used by the Board to monitor the ongoing operation of each of the journals and has, on occasion, led to recommendations for adding or replacing an associate editor. Periodically the Board also reviews data on publication lag—that is, the time between acceptance of a manuscript for publication and its appearance in print.
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