Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP) is a flagship journal of the Association for Logic Programming addressed to researchers studying logic programming with all its theoretical, implementation and application aspects, as well as to those interested in computational logic, constraint and declarative programming, knowledge representation, deductive databases, and rule-based reasoning.
A strong, high-quality journal is vital to the well-being our research community and to the growth of these fields. My goal for this brief article is to bring you up to date on what is going on with the journal, and to seek your input and help to make it better.
The year 2016 will bring some changes to TPLP. First, in an effort to broaden the involvement of the community in running the journal, we will switch to three-year term appointments for area editors and editorial advisors, with an extension to one additional term possible. Since January 1, 2016, all current members of the board are appointed to specific terms.
As these terms come to a close, we will ask others to step in.
Second, in January 2016 we will launch an on-line paper management system.
With their next manuscripts, the authors should check carefully the submission instructions on the journal web-page, as the process will differ from the one we followed until now. I am sure there will be glitches, but we will work through them. The change will allow some time savings for area editors and the editor-in-chief. The big benefit, though, will be the shortening of the time from submission to decision. My initial goal is to have all accepted papers published no later than 12 months after they were submitted. Ultimately, I want to reduce it even further to nine months or less.
That brings me to the second objective behind this article. The journal needs your involvement. Thus, I make a strong appeal to you to agree to review papers when approached by area editors. Lining up the reviewers is a time consuming process that affects in a major way how long the paper remains in processing. Most importantly, I am asking for your submissions. I have heard comments that TPLP review process takes too long and that this has made the authors submit elsewhere. As I promised above, this is about to change. In fact, even now our backlog is mostly under control.
I also want to encourage you to consider being guest editors for special issues of the journal. This is something we want to promote for TPLP. If you have an idea for a topic, please let me know and I will have the editorial board consider your proposal. We will follow the same process for survey articles about particular topics, something we tried rarely in the past but would like to expand. Clearly, good survey articles have an obvious value for the community.
To stay in touch with TPLP you might want to receive content alerts and
other updates at http://journals.cambridge.org/action/registration?page=contentAlert&jid=TLP&type=3&journalTitle=Theory+and+Practice+of+Logic+Programming .
Also, I will try to make a habit of publishing annual updates on the state of the journal in the newsletter. I am sure that with a stronger engagement on the part of the community TPLP will continue to grow and serve us well.
If you think of any ideas for the journal that might be worth exploring, please let me know. The journal is our great asset but also our shared responsibility.
Mirek Truszczynski
Editor-in-Chief of TPLP