STTT

International Journal on Software Tools for Technology Transfer

STTT Cover

Invited Issues

STTT supports two types of Invited Issues: Event-based Special Issues and thematic Special Sections.

In the case of a smaller number of papers (e.g., 3-4), the content of an Invited Issue is complemented by additional material.

All Invited Issues should include a short overview paper, typically written by the editors of the Invited Issue, that describes the goals/scope of the event or theme, summarizes the alignment between the event/theme and the STTT scope, and provides a roadmap to the papers in the Invited Issue while noting interesting relationships between them.

Each Invited Issue is initiated and organized by one or more Invited Issue Guest Editors who submit a written proposal for the Invited Issue and oversee the submission and reviewing process. Online collection of papers, organization of reviewing, and collection of camera-ready versions will be supported by the STTT Office.

Proposals for Invited Issues must be submitted prior to the invitation of potential contributors by the prospective Guest Editor(s) to the STTT office. They must contain:

The proposals will be examined by the responsible Editorial Board, and, if approved, instructions and guidance will be provided to the Invited Issue Guest Editors, including an official authorization to publicize or solicit papers for the Invited Issue.

Specific guidance for each type of Invited Issue is given below.

Special Issues: Proposals for event-based Special Issues will typically be submitted by conference or workshop program chairs before the Call-for-Papers of the event is disseminated. This enables approval for the Special Issue to be announced in the event Call-for-Papers as an incentive for submission. Proposals should include a draft Call-for-Papers of the event supported by a description of the event. If previous versions of an event have had associated Special Issues, the journals used for the previous events should be indicated.

It is expected that papers in the Special Issue will contain at least 30% additional content beyond the versions of papers appearing in the associated conference proceedings. This additional content would typically include an expansion of the examples treated, enhancement of evaluations and experimental results, or more detailed descriptions of the techniques or tools aiming for reproducibility of the work or enabling better comparisons with other work.

Each Special Issue starts with an introduction of, typically, 3-5 pages written by the guest editors, which present the event and sketch the selected contribution.

Special Sections: Proposals for thematic Special Issues may be made by one or more organizers who wish to champion a particular “hot” research area or theme by providing a comprehensive theme overview together with a selection of characteristic technical papers.

A Thematic Special Issue will typically contain the following.

  1. An Overview in the form of an introductory (full-length) paper, usually written or solicited by the Special Issue Editor(s). Due to the emphasis on technology transfer, the overview should introduce the addressed field, indicate its practical relevance, present an overview of the state of the art in research and industrial approaches, and explain the role of the individual contributions within this landscape. The language and the presentation style should be chosen so as to attract the interest of an audience of non-experts and be informative for readers with a good general background in Computer Science, so that even newcomers to the topic could profit from it.

  2. 3-8 Technical papers solicited by the Special Section Editor(s), concerning existing research results, prototypes, commercially available tools, applications, case studies, benchmarks, etc. Like regular papers, these contributions should be representative of the current state of research and best practices and should possibly offer a critical vision of it. The presentation style should also address a wide audience from the Computer Science community, although more technical details should be provided than in the overview. In addition, the technical papers should be constructed (following guidance provided by the Special Issue Editors) to have cohesion, commonalities, and cross-references that present the papers as a collective contribution to the field (as opposed to disjoint standalone papers).

Proposals for Special Sections should describe the qualifications (in particular, concerning the proposed topic) of the Guest Editors, the importance of the proposed theme and its relationship to the STTT scope, concepts to be stressed in the Overview Paper, a structured list of prospective contributors of both overview and technical papers, and intended strategies for presenting the technical papers as a cohesive contribution to the community.

Reviewing for Invited Issues is handled by the corresponding Guest Editors along the lines of the standard reviewing procedure. However, as most of these contributions are invited, the reviewing process focuses more on suggestions of improvement than on selection. It is the Guest Editors duty to

  1. Propose experts for a technical review - some peer reviewing between the various authors of the Special Section is recommended. Moreover, for Invited Issues it is customary to also involve the reviewers of the event the contributions are selected from.

  2. Take editorial decisions on the basis of the reviews and the adequacy of the contribution for STTT and provide a summarizing feedback to the authors.

  3. Trim the Invited Issue for coherence, in particular by suggesting cross-referencing between the individual contributions, and, in the particular in case of Thematic Issues, by conveying a common message via the introductory paper.

The whole process is directly supported by the Editors-in-Chief.