Jot at five

February/March 2007

Not all readers of this column may be familiar yet with the Journal of Object Technology (JOT), the principal international journal on objects and components, published at ETH Zurich. As JOT (http://www.jot.fm) is now approaching its fifth anniversary you may be interested in a glimpse (adapted from a editorial of last year) into the enterprise, its goals, and its operation.

The first issue was published on May 1st of 2002 and ever since JOT has come out on the first of every odd-numbered month, plus quite a few even-numbered months for special issues.

JOT was created to fill a gap, when the Journal of Object-Oriented Programming disappeared. It has achieved that goal and gone beyond, quickly developing a personality of its own. The object-oriented and component scene in 2007 is quite different from what it was 20 years ago (when JOOP started) and even ten years ago. From Web services to aspect-oriented programming, ownership types to model-driven development, our community continues to bring in new ideas
- sometimes faster than the field can absorb them - and JOT is the place of choice to present these ideas to the world and discuss them in depth.

The site statistics speak for themselves. JOT gets almost 1200 unique visitors a day; that's about 200,000 pages a month. It's impossible to determine the exact number of readers, but extrapolating from the site statistics suggests about 50,000.

JOT has achieved this success through the hard work of the editor-in-chief, Richard Wiener, assisted by the program committee, the regular columnists and the editorial assistants. The core of the journal's content is the result of a constant influx of quality papers.

Here are a few statistics (for 2006, regular issues only) communicated by Richard Wiener:

* Average time between receiving paper and publication decision: 38 days
* Average time between publication decision and publication: 11 months

The decision time is amazing; so is the publication time as compared to most journals. It would look even better if the figures accounted for special issues, which usually come out of conferences or workshops.

JOT made from the start the decision to be an all-electronic journal. We have nothing against paper, but this policy has enabled us to be nimble and establish JOT in a fraction of the time that would otherwise have been necessary; the key advantage is that we can concentrate our efforts on contents, not logistics (of printing, mailing etc.). There are a few side advantages as well; citing Richard again:

Because there is no paper used in publishing JOT, the 15-page constraint that was in place during the first year or two has been relaxed. Authors are still required to write in a concise and readable style, but if they require more than 15 pages while meeting our editorial standards they are not asked to shorten their manuscript length artificially.

JOT is a success story of electronic scientific publishing. This story deserves to be better known, in particular by science indexes and academic evaluation bodies.

Ironically the Eiffel column of JOT, which I used to write, is currently inactive as I haven't had enough time recently, but it will definitely restart; suggestions for guest columns are always welcome. More generally I hope that you enjoy http://www.jot.fm or will discover it, and look forward to many more article submissions on object-oriented topics, Eiffel-related or not.

-- Bertrand Meyer