Our Formal Organization

Modus Operandi

The operation of the ETAI is shared between:

• The Scientific Editor-in-Chief, who coordinates the work of the Scientific Area Editors for the various ETAI scientific areas;
• The General Editor, working together with the ETAI secretariat.

Scientific Editors

The Scientific Area Editors receive articles, organize their open reviewing and confidential refereeing, and set up the communication channels that are needed for this to work. This includes, in particular, the use of News Journals or Newsletters. In this process, submitted articles constitute the input, and the outputs are:

• Improvements to the article.
• Accept or decline decisions for the article to the ETAI as a Journal.
• A discussion about the article that is posted on the web and has been conducted in cooperation between peers.

In addition, the Scientific Area Editors may choose to use the same communication channels (web pages, news journals, etc) for other and related, academic purposes, such as to organize "panel" discussions on timely topics, or to set up a calendarium for the benefit of researchers in the field.

The Scientific Editor-in-Chief coordinates the work of the Scientific Area Editors, proposes and interprets the scientific quality and acceptance policy of the Journal, and makes the final decision in case the acceptance decision of an Area Editor should be challenged.

General Editor and Secretariat

The General Editor is in charge of the proper functioning of the communication and publication facilities of the Journal, and the actual work in these respects is carried out in the ETAI secretariat. With respect to the flow of results specified above, they shall

• Administrate the flow of articles, in their successive generations after revision
• Facilitate and further develop the Journal's system for open discussion about articles
• Coordinate and extend the information services that are an intrinsic part of the Journal's offerings
• Implement the accept or decline decisions and administrate the assembly of accepted articles to form successive issues of the ETAI in the sense of a journal
• Ensure that the resulting information from the scientific editors' activities (itemized list above) is presented in a coherent and effective fashion to the AI research community.

Journal Status

The Electronic Transactions on Artificial Intelligence is formally registered as a periodical that is issued in two editions: an electronic, on-line edition and a paper edition.

Each of the ETAI research areas operates one or more Newsmedia for communication with the readership. Different areas use different choices of newsmedia corresponding to the needs of the area and in order to try out different approaches. We distinguish between News Journals that appear 4-12 times a year, and Newsletters that appear daily or almost daily during those days when there is some information to convey.

News Journals can appear in HTML editions for on-line reading and/or in latex-based editions (postscript and/or PDF) for off-line reading. Newsletters can appear in either of plaintext editions (to be sent by direct e-mail), HTML, or latex-based versions.

For one of the News Journals, the latex-based edition has been formally registered as a periodical, namely for:

• Electronic News Journal on Reasoning about Actions and Change

In all cases, such Newsletters are the responsibility of the respective area editor.

Lines of Responsibility

• The ETAI is published under the scientific patronage of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the European Coordinating Committee for Artificial Intellligence (ECCAI). These jointly appoint a policy committee for the ETAI. Please click "Policy Committee" in the menu bar to the left for additional details.
• The policy committee appoints ETAI's scientific editor-in-chief and its general editor. The term is normally for four years at a time.
• The scientific editor-in-chief reports on the developments of ETAI to the ECCAI Board. The general editor likewise reports to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
• ETAI's professional activities (reviewing and colloquia) are organized through scientific areas. Each scientific area is led by a scientific area editor and an area editorial committee, which are also appointed for four-year terms. The choice of areas and the appointments of the area editors is done by the policy committee.
• The General Editor organizes the ETAI secretariat and reports to the policy committee about its operation
• The General Editor is also responsible for the economic side of the operation, making sure that sufficient resources are available for meeting the ETAI's commitments with respect to making and keeping information available to its scientific community. (This however does not include any responsibility for covering the costs incurred by the Scientific Area Editors in carrying out their commitments).

The ETAI Policy Comittee

Mandate and role

The ETAI policy committee is requested to fill the same role, or analogous roles, as those which the publishing company fill for a conventional journal. This includes a general supervision of the Journal, in order to react if some problem should arise which is not handled in a more ordinary way. It also includes making decisions or giving advice on matters such as:

• Definition, interpretation, and modification of the range of the ETAI research areas
• Policy and procedures for the distribution of the ETAI, by electronic means and on paper.
• Approval of first publication archives and decision on policies with respect to what is to be required from them
• Procedures for guaranteeing the long-time integrity, availability, and persistence of materials published within the ETAI system.
• Principles for how to respond to appeals from authors who feel they were incorrectly treated by an area editor
• Relationships to other scientific publication channels
• General policy issues for the ETAI.

Composition

The Policy Committee consists of the Scientific Editor-in-Chief (chairperson), the General Editor (reports on the activities), and five additional members. According to the publication agreement between the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (KVA), the ECCAI, and Linkoping University Electronic Press, the KVA will appoitn one member and the ECCAI will appoint four members for the policy committee. The Policy Committee presently (2003) has the following members:

Wolfgang Wahlster (scientific editor-in-chief)
Erik Sandewall (general editor)
Roger Wäppling (nominated by KVA)
Luigia Aiello
Anthony Cohn
Vadim Stefanuk
One additional ETAI member pending.

Requirements on First Publication Archives

The following are the requirements for being an ETAI approved First Publication Archive.

General background

For the purpose of the ETAI, a First Publication Archive is an organization that provides the following services to authors of research papers and to the scientific community in our field:

• Receiving research papers from authors and making them available on the Internet over an extended period of time. These articles are to be considered as published in the sense of the ETAI.
• Safeguarding the integrity of the document, so that its contents can not be changed during the period of availability. This also includes, very definitely, that the author shall not be able to modify or withdraw his or her work during that period.
• Making sure that the copyright conditions and other legal aspects are such that the reader community does not encounter any problems in obtaining copies of these articles and in using them for legitimate academic purposes in teaching and research.

The ETAI will identify a number of approved First Publication Archives. In order to be considered by the ETAI scientific publishing system, an article must first of all have been published by an ETAI approved FPA.

Approval criteria for First Publication Archives

The following criteria will be applied.

Persistency criteria

Identity on the net. The FPA must be associated with a specific site on the Internet, containing a WWW server, and it must be plausible that this site will remain on the net without interruption and that it will continue to provide a server.

Reliable operating organization. An organization of professional quality must be operating the site.

Official commitment to remain. There must be a formal decision by a body which has the authority to make such a decision, such as the board of the university, that the FPA will retain articles on the net for a specified period once they have been published. This period must not be less than 20 years from the date of publication. The commitment may be conditional on force majeure and other unlikely events outside the control of the committing body.

Well defined escape procedure. For the unlikely enventuality that the FPA will not be able to continue its operation, there must be a well defined procedure for how to transfer the contents of the FPA to one or more other sites. This procedure must be technically realistic and legally valid.

Public and inspectable procedure to guarantee that published articles do not change over time. It is foreseen that "public notary" services for electronic seals will be created, and until then we need to use a combination of technical and administrative measures to make sure that articles are persistent.

Presentation criteria

Publication procedure. The articles made available by the FPA must be presented as having been published. In particular, the stream of articles published by the FPA must be assigned an ISSN number in the standard way.

If one and the same operating organization publishes several series of articles, each having its own identity and ISSN number, then each of those series will be considered as a separate FPA for the purposes that follow.

Graphical appearance. The FPA must use and enforce criteria for the graphical appearance of published articles, making a serious attempt to maintain a high and uniform graphical standard. The ETAI will not attempt to be judge of taste, but it will not approve an FPA that clearly does not care about this matter. The use of a standardized style is highly recommended.

The graphical design shall be made so that it looks nice when printed on A4 size paper (210*297 mm). At the same time, information must not be lost if it is printed on American letter size paper (218*282 mm), although aesthetic quality may be compromised in this case.

Linguistic appearance. The FPA must use and enforce the obvious requirement that articles are correct with respect to grammar, vocabulary, and spelling.

Citations. It is recommended (but not required) that the references used in or at the end of the article are constructed using a database scheme, or at least a uniform naming scheme, so that an on-line version of the article or its reference list can be equipped with hot links and be amenable to automatic analysis (for example, for creating inverted reference lists). The copyright conditions on the article must not allow such usage of the list or set of references.

Selection criteria

FPA editor. Before being accepted by the FPA, articles must be screened by an editor who checks that the article is scientifically reasonable and that it does not contain materials that are contrary or irrelevant for the scientific purpose of the article.

The purpose of this screening is only to be a filter against more or less obvious garbage; it does not constitute scientific quality control and does not replace peer review.