State of the Journal

AS 2017 is drawing to a close, I am delighted to report that TVCG is in an excellent state and to announce that the 2016 2-year impact factor of TVCG rose to 2.840, which is the highest of its impact factors since its inception. The number of submissions has been steadily growing over the years. In 2016, TVCG received 388 new submissions, which is the largest number of submissions in a single year in the history of the journal. By the end of November 2017, the number of new submissions reached 385 (not including those for the special issues) and, by the end of 2017, we expect TVCG to reach a record high number of submissions in a single year. We have continued expanding the TVCG editorial board with the appointment of eleven new associate editors in 2017, thereby replacing the four associate editors who “graduated” in the same year. The number of editorial board members in the last three years has increased by more than 40 percent, thereby promoting gender diversity and maintaining a balanced geographical distribution. The IEEE VIS 2016 conference issue, containing the Proceedings of the IEEE Information Visualization, IEEE Scientific Visualization, and IEEEVisual Analytics Science and Technology 2016 Conferences, has been published as the TVCG January 2017 issue. Similarly, the VIS 2017 conference issue already appeared as the TVCG January 2018 issue. The Proceedings of the IEEE Virtual Reality Conference (VR 2017) and of the IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR 2017) have been published as the April and November 2017 issues, respectively, of TVCG. We observed 448, 174, and 117 submissions to IEEE VIS 2016, IEEE VR 2017 and IEEE ISMAR 2017, respectively, with an increase in submissions of more than 30 percent for VR and ISMARwith respect to 2016. Moreover, the five best papers from the IEEE Pacific Visualization Symposium (IEEE PacificVis 2017) have been directly published as a special section in the June 2017 issue of TVCG. The total number of papers published in 2017 is 232, distributed among twelve issues, accounting for a total of 2,666 printed pages. The IEEE VIS special issue contains 100 papers, which account for 43 percent of the journal content in 2017, while the IEEE VR and IEEE ISMAR special issues contain 16 papers and 14 papers, respectively. The PacificVis 2017 special section contains the five best papers from the symposium, selected from 29 papers accepted out of 99 submissions. All submissions in the special issues, including the PacificVis special section, went through a rigorous two-round journalquality review process directly overseen by TVCG. In 2017, we also published extended versions of best papers from the ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games (I3D) 2016 and from the ACM SIGGRAPH/ Eurographics Symposia on Computer Animation (SCA) 2015 and 2016. TVCG continues to offer authors a remarkably efficient processing of submitted manuscripts: the average time from submission to the first decision is about to 75 days. In 2017, as in the last few years, the authors of TVCG regular papers have been invited to give an oral presentation of their papers at TVCG’s partner conferences. We have been successfully continuing the path of collaboration with the conferences for which TVCG publishes the proceedings as special issues, in scientific and information visualization, in visual analytics, and in virtual and augmented reality. We have also seen an increasing number of partner conferences in computer graphics, animation and geometric modeling, that enable authors of accepted TVCG graphics papers to present their work. This arrangement continues to provide a unique opportunity for the audience of all these conferences to keep abreast of high-quality research featured in TVCG, while encouraging more TVCG authors to attend these conferences. This partnership has been very well received by conference attendees and by TVCG authors. TVCG has been invited to organize very well attended sessions in the areas of visualization, and of augmented and virtual reality, both at SIGGRAPH 2017 and at SIGGRAPH Asia 2017, where we featured the best papers published in TVCG in those areas. Some exemplary work of TVCGwith more general appeal has been featured in IEEE Computer, and Computing Now. TVCG participates in the Code Ocean initiative launched by IEEE on February 2017, which provides a new service for distributing a paper’s accompanying code in a way that integrates with that paper’s listing in IEEE Xplore. Code Ocean’s platform enables authors to upload and configure their code to run in the cloud so that it is fully executable, and citable. All authors of papers that have been submitted to TVCG or have been recently accepted to TVCG are invited to try out this free service by going to https://codeocean.com/ieee/signup. TVCG participates also in the IEEE DataPort trial, which started in October 2017. IEEE DataPort (https://ieee-dataport.org) is a new IEEE data service now available to all IEEE members, and to the global technical community. All TVCG authors have direct access to IEEE DataPort and the opportunity to store their datasets up to 2TB in size, which can be loaded anytime during paper submission or after acceptance, and can be referenced with a unique and persistent DOI (Digital Object Identifier).