Tenth Anniversary of the ASCE Practice Periodical on Structural Design and Construction

(We wish to extend our thanks to Vernon B. Watwood for his significant contribution in the writing of this editorial.)

The end of this year (2005) completes $10\text{years}$ of service for the Practice Periodical on Structural Design and Construction. In line with this, the Editorial Board wishes to bring before its readers some historical facts about the origin of this publication and provide some pertinent statistics that reflect the breadth of its readership and state of its health.

You may recall that over the years, practicing engineers involved in design and construction of structures did not have a technical, professional publication that served their particular needs. This lack of a professional publication was discussed both formally and informally whenever construction or structural engineers met at professional meetings and otherwise. It also was a topic of discussion at the Executive Committees of both the Construction Division and the Structures Division of ASCE.

This topic had been on the mind of the Editors of the Journal of Structural Engineering (JSE) for several years. In 1993, Vernon Watwood became the Editor and when he assumed that office, one of the concerns that were passed along by the previous Editor, Jim Yao, was a lack of practical papers in the journal that would be of interest to the practicing professional.

Tom Williamson, a prior editor of the JSE, had also had several discussions on this subject with Ms. Nina Kramer, who was at that time the Manager of Journals for ASCE.

Joe Kaplan, a member of the Construction Division Executive Committee and Chair in 1993, had also seen the need for more practical papers than usually appeared in the Journal of Construction Engineering and Management (JCE&M) and had been looking for some way to alter that journal to achieve his goal. Joe is not one to be bashful about expressing his views and had discussed this issue with Ms. Kramer on several occasions. Bernie Monahan had served on the Construction Division EXCOM and had taken an active part in the discussions regarding the JCE&M.

Ms. Kramer and the other ASCE Publications staff were receiving input from many sources in both the Structural and Construction Divisions regarding the lack of interest of practicing professionals in both the JSE and the JCE&M. It was clear that practicing engineers wanted a publication that would be of greater value to them, and ASCE Publications recognized their responsibility to meet that need.

In the process of looking for a solution to the lack of practical papers, Vernon Watwood also raised this issue with Ms. Kramer. Previous discussion had centered on the need to attract more practical and fewer research-oriented papers for publication in the JSE. There were however, serious problems with attempting to alter the existing journals. For the JSE, in particular, there was and had been for some time a huge backlog of papers waiting to be published which at times was over two years. The page budget had already been increased as much as was considered acceptable and the journal appeared monthly. There simply was not room for a new group of papers. In addition, the JSE as well as the JCE&M were and still are highly respected archival journals for the research community throughout the world, and many people were fearful that if significant changes were made to the format and content of these journals, their reputation as research journals would be damaged. No one wanted to do that.

So as a result of considerable thought on the parts of Nina Kramer and David R. Dresia, then Managing Director of Publications for ASCE, Ms. Kramer approached Tom Williamson, Joseph Kaplan, Bernard Monahan, and Vernon Watwood with the concept of launching a practice-oriented journal to include articles on structural design and construction. These four people were asked to serve on a committee to investigate the feasibility of this approach to the problem and the committee was formerly appointed in the fall of 1993.

As with most committees, the first meeting or so did not accomplish much but different ideas and concepts were discussed. However, in the spring of 1995, the committee met in Las Vegas and it all came together. Under the leadership of the Chair, Joe Kaplan, the committee decided that a separate publication was indeed needed but the criteria for publication had to be modified somewhat from that used by JSE and JCE&M, which operated with the usual research-journal procedures. The Committee concluded that the primary criterion for acceptance of a paper should be simply that it would be of interest and useful to the practicing profession. This seems obvious now, but it took the group a while to reach that conclusion.

It was decided that to ensure that the operating procedure did not regress to the research-journal mode of operation, the publication would not be called a journal but rather a practice periodical, and that a different mode of paper-review would be established to speed up that particular process. In addition, to get ideas published that probably would not appear because of the formalities of writing a paper, the committee decided to include Forums, for both structural engineering and construction engineering, in addition to the more typical articles. The concept was to operate somewhat like letters to the editors except that the forum editors would actively solicit participation. The forum concept has proved valuable to the success of the publication.

Another of the ideas of the original committee was to form an Editorial Board made up of experienced and distinguished practicing engineers whose one function would be to generate papers. Although it seemed like a good idea, it did not generate many papers and after a while the Editorial Board was dropped.

To ensure that everything got off on the right foot, the four individuals on the Committee agreed to serve as the initial editors (now called the Executive Council of Editors) of the Practice Periodical. In addition, forum editors were appointed after a thorough search aided by Ms. Kramer. These were William R. Nash for the construction side and Carl Lehman for the structural side.

After approval by the ASCE Board Publication Committee, the stage was set for the first issue, which appeared in February 1996.

The practice periodical survived the formative years thanks to the hard work of all the editors and the clear need for such a publication in the design/construction profession. Two of the original editors, Vernon B. Watwood and Joseph Kaplan, retired and were replaced by new editors.

The Periodical is currently healthy and has established itself as a credible, worthy publication. Since its launch in 1996, it has grown from a modest quarterly with a page budget of 178 pages to a more prosperous quarterly with a page budget of 250 pages. The 72-page increase translates to the submission of 27–36 additional manuscripts per year, depending on their length. For a practitioner’s journal, this kind of growth is no mean feat, as editors must constantly encourage potential authors to submit papers for review. Unlike other journal editors who can depend on spontaneous submissions to fill their journal’s pages, a practice periodical’s editors must make sure that enough papers are solicited to fill the budgeted pages. That requires constant vigilance.

The publication’s strong points are its rapid review period and the applied/practical nature of its content. It has historically had a large number of subscribers, and when ranked by that criterion, falls in the top one-third of all ASCE journals. That is an unequivocal measure of success.

As is evident from Table 1, the submission rate varies considerably from year to year. When the supply of papers was close to drying up in 2000, the editors made a concerted effort to capture more content and succeeded in increasing submissions by a factor of 2.5 in 2001. This led to a large backlog of papers awaiting publication. ASCE increased the page budget accordingly to help dissipate the buildup, but did so in a conservative way so as not to permanently commit the editors to filling an inflated number of pages in perpetuity. Page budgets and their associated subscription rates either increase or remain level; they never decline, so the ASCE staff has been careful not to recommend unsustainable growth. Since 2001, the Practice Periodical has enjoyed a period of stability while the backlogged papers have worked their way through the publication queue. However, owing to the low number of new submissions in 2004 and very few in 2005, the editors have been notified that they must begin actively soliciting new contributions again.

The lengthy turnaround times noted in Table 2 reflect queue time almost exclusively. Ideally, the publication would never be backlogged more than one issue, meaning that queue time would never exceed the normal lead time of $4\text{months}$ , plus another $3\text{months}$ until time to schedule the next issue, but that balance is difficult to achieve when the rate of new submissions varies widely. Median turnaround time has traditionally been reported for two representative issues per year for the Board of Direction’s Publication Committee. The manuscript tracking system ASCE adopted in 2000 enabled staff to start tracking mean turnaround time as well.

Almost all of the papers published by the practice periodical are submitted by authors from the United States. The overall society average (for academic journals almost exclusively) is close to 50% international contributors, 50% domestic.

The ASCE staff commends the editors for their unwavering enthusiasm and support of the Practice Periodical. Without their commitment, the publication would not be enjoying its current success. The staff looks forward to many more years of happy partnership with the current team of editors.

We, the Editorial Board of the Practice Periodical, invite our readers to give us some feedback on the following: