Thảo luận:The Inauguration of The ViPLOK Journal
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Một số thảo luận[sửa]
Hi all,
There's no doubt about the creteria for articles published in the ViPLoK suggested by Dat complemened by Xuehe. We want, of course, the ViPLoK articles to have the quailty as high as possible. But there's still some points need to be clarified (perhaps you discussed about it already):
1. The main readers?
Of course, the Vietnamsese scientists who live and work in VN will be the main readers. Those who do research abroad for sure can access to most of the scientific journal and will no take VipLok as an important refereance source for their research. Therefore, we should focus on what the readers need, not what we want.
2. The contributing authors
It seems that there will be three groups of contributing authors: the ovesea vietnamsese scientists, the Vietnamese living and working in VN and foreign research who has close relationship with those in the two groups above. If we agree that the main readers are the scientists living and working in VN, it's natural for them to be important part of the contributing authors. Therefore, we may lower the requirements for the research papers. The oversea Vietnamese and foreign scientists will contribute mainly to the review and commentary articles to keep the journal balanced between quality and qantity. After somes years, when ViPloK already attract a reasonable number of contributing authors, we will increase the requirements for the published articles.
3. Timing
A period of 6-9 months for an article to be published is too long. We should try to decrease it to about 2 months. Note that the scientists publish the articles not for fun. Students need published paper to finish his/her thesis, scientist need them for references when writing project, etc. Therefore, to be attractive, a period of 2 months or shorter is an advantage.
4. Main purpouse of VipLoK
What is the main purpose of ViPLoK? To be a good scietific journal or to be a means to convey knowledge to accademic community in VN? If ViPLoK intend to be a good scietific journal, i.e. it publishes good papers from good scientist, its name seems to be not really suitable. Good scientist wants to be proud of his/her publication, and wants his/her parpers to be cited or referenced in other good scientific writing. In this case, the name ViPLoK seems not really suitable since it makes people think about some kind of knowledge for general readers, not for academic readers. To improve it, ViPLoK may be better to be devided into different journal, e.g: Vietnamese International Journal of Chemistry, Vietnamese International Journal of Physics/mathermatics/computer science, etc. (the name Vietnamese Journal of Chemistry/physics has been used already). With this, it is easied to persuade good scientist to publish their articles on these journals, not on the seems-to-be general ViPLoK.
If ViPLoK intends to be a means of conveying knowledge to general commmunity, its name is fine, but the requirements for its contents should be changed.
Just some thoughts about ViPLoK. Hope it will be useful.
Duong
Dear Duong,
Thanks for your comments on our strategy for The ViPLOK Journal. Since you are new, here are some of the thoughts I have for the journal:
1. The name: The name is ViPLOK and it is not necessary that we need to spell it out like International Business Machine for IBM or Silicon Graphics Inc for SGI or Nature..... The term knowledge here does not necessarily meant "common knowledge" but to include science and non-science alike (i.e., social science, humanity and the Arts including education). I do not think ViPLOK is worse than many other journal names that I've seen such as PLOS, or even JACS (Journal of American Chemical Society), or IEEE. If anyone can propose a better name and all of us agree with that, we will change the name.
2. Quality: Our goal is to establish the journal as an image for the Vietnamese scientific community to the outside world and henceforth our readers are anyone who is interested in (it is an open-access journal, BTW). Therefore, quality is the only thing we have in mind. Of course, we will not be able to have articles at the comparable level to nature.com at the presence, but you need to know that it took them >130 years to get to this point. In addition many good articles cannot get published there anyway due to the politics in the peer-reviewed process (perhaps Khanh can tell you more about this). Initially, it may be difficult to attract high-quality research work, that is the reason why the journal needs contribution from each of us to get it rolled (I did my part). Once we can establish the first impact factor for the journal, in which we are working hard, it is no longer a question if the community needs it or not. On contrary, if we lower the standard for research and review articles now, the journal will be death in 1 year. If we can publish at least 1 good research article a year for the first few years, we would be more satisfied with that, rather than publishing 100 junk articles.
3. Timing: I don't know where you get 6-9 months for the reviewing process, we wrote on the web that we aim to return referees' comment to the author(s) in ~45 days (please read the call for papers). Note that the average time for reviewing a manuscript in specialized journal s is at least 3-4 months (or about a year in statistics). Initially we are still young and hence weak, but we will work hard and be organized. For a few articles from VN scientists, since their writing is not so good, it took us a much longer time than usual to help them rewrite (if they send to other journals, their manuscript would get returned in 1 week because it is rejected).
4. If you have a nice piece of work and you can make it to nature/science/pnas, I would be very happy for you. For so many people, they have good research results, especially in the area of mathematics and computer science, but do not know how to convey their finding to the potential readership and therefore can't publish. The ViPLOK journal would help them to do so. Note that, a Nobel prize in Chemistry in 2001 went to a Japanese engineer who did not even have a Ph.D. degree for his contribution to a unknown well-known journal with respect to the world stage in the area of Mass spectrometry for biological molecules. The strength of the ViPLOK journal is that it is open access and free of charge to authors, which I think can help a lot of people like the Japanese Nobel Laureate. This model of ours is one of the kind in the world now.
5. For the scope, covering many broad topics does not mean bad and light weight. A comparison of the impact factors of JACS (best journal in chemistry), or Physical Review (best Journal in Physics) to that of journals like nature, science, and PNAS will tell a more accurate picture. When I was at UC-Davis, I never appreciated science or nature journals since I thought they were junk, but my time at Harvard taught me otherwise. This seems to be a huge mis-conception for many of us.
In my view, it is a long shot to establish a high quality journal that we are all can be proud off; and that what we will do following a Chinese proverb: "A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step [forward]". If we make a backward step, we will go back to where we were before: no where.
Please feel free to bring up your opinions so that we can discuss about it.
Thanks very much, --Dat
