First Anniversary Editorial

This issue of Journal of Surveying Engineering (JSE) marks my first anniversary as Editor of the Journal. I will corroborate, as I did in my very first editorial after taking over the job, that I am thankful for the opportunity and the challenge of helping to manage the review process of a journal as prestigious as JSE. Overall, I would like to think that meaningful progress was realized during my first $12\text{months}$ of tenure. However, I must confess that it was a difficult beginning in view of the large volume of backlogged manuscripts that I encountered and the slow pace of the review process over the last few years. I am glad to report that this particular situation has perceptibly improved lately, thanks to the help of ASCE Journals Department staff, various members of the Editorial Board, and the collaboration of several additional reviewers who willingly answered my request for their valuable scientific advice, but, above all, for their prompt response to my inquiries. Therefore, when you see their names listed in the last issue of each volume, I can assure you that their recognition is well deserved. Their work is invaluable to the authors because it provides independent, objective, and detailed scientific evaluation necessary to impartially accept or decline a paper for publication. Thanks to their unbiased observations and their expanded comments about the strengths and weaknesses of the submissions, they have been able to choose the best manuscripts strictly based on quality, originality, and significance of the investigation.

Improvements in our peer-review modus operandi will not end here. We are trying to focus more closely on the topics directly related to the needs of surveying engineers by providing state-of-the-art theory, methods, and techniques relevant to our principal audience and subscribers. As usual, manuscripts submitted for publication must meet the Journal’s criteria for acceptance. Attempting to avoid unnecessary reviews, the Editor screens all submissions and makes a decision about the feasibility of the manuscript for publication. If it isn’t suitable for the Journal, the authors are informed of the decision, giving them the opportunity to select an alternative journal where their manuscript may stand a better chance of acceptance.

Although during my previous experience as a member of the Editorial Board I occasionally discovered cases of dual submission and duplicate publication—self-plagiarism, I confess that I was not prepared for the shock of realizing how common this type of unethical behavior is among today’s authors. The temptation, and often misguided decision, to double submit has reached epidemic proportions, and it is imperative to combat this conscious violation of one of the most sacred rules of scholarly etiquette by imposing sanctions on offending authors. This past year, authors submitted manuscripts to the JSE that had already been published or were under consideration by other journals, expecting to circumvent the existing selection practice by making minor cosmetic changes such as revising graphs, including new inconsequential figures, inserting additional references, and rearranging the sequence of authors. This is a flagrant attempt to deceive the Journal, abuse the good faith and commitment of the reviewers, and waste their valuable time. This is unacceptable behavior and contravenes ASCE’s statement of ethical standards for publication in its journals (http:∕∕www.pubs.asce.org∕authors∕index).

In the short span of $1\text{year}$ , six manuscripts, basically previously published in other copyrighted journals, were submitted again for consideration to JSE. This statistic took me by surprise. Consequently, in the future, I may notify other editors who are perhaps unaware that manuscripts already published in their journal were submitted to JSE with minor alterations. In addition, some form of punitive action will be taken.

Several flagrant cases were detected last year before publication occurred. The manuscripts were immediately taken out of the publication queue and the authors notified. Most surprising was to read the excuses presented by some of the offenders to justify their behavior. Authors who had previously published the same material almost verbatim in other scientific journals justified their behavior with these explanations:

“We thought that the publication of the whole methodology […] should also be of interest for the surveying community. That is why we chose your Journal of Surveying Engineering.”

“The purpose of the paper was to present an implementation of the theory which [I present] in detail in my former papers and I [refer] the reader to those papers. Since JSE speaks to engineers I was thinking it may be interesting to show here…”

One author, once discovered, openly apologized for the “wrong behavior.”

Some authors disregard the waste of valuable time and resources that dual submission causes. This Journal is not going to tolerate their behavior nor allow them to inflate their publication record by placing quantity above quality. Offending authors could be banned from publishing for some period of time and their names released to editors of affected journals. In extreme cases, an author’s infraction might be reported to his∕her home institution. I hope that authors will behave with integrity when submitting manuscripts for publication, thus protecting their reputation and avoiding unpleasant sanctions.