[Insight-developers] INSIGHT JOURNAL & Recent sub-standard submissions

[Luis Ibanez]

We want to clarify the situation with recent submissions
that have been posted to the Insight Journal.



A) As a way of supporting several Workshops at the upcoming MICCAI
    conference, the infrastructure of the Insight Journal was offered
    at no-charge to Workshop organizers.


B) Unfortunately, several of these MICCAI Workshops are using the
    Insight Journal service simply as an online storage for papers,
    and have preferred to adopt the decadent standard practices of
    conferences and journals that include:


      - Closed and anonymous reviews

      - Non-reproducible papers (e.g. papers that do not provide
        the means for reproducing the work described in the paper)
        (which in the definition of the IJ are *unscientific papers*)

      - Keep papers hidden from the public during the review process


     These practices *ARE NOT* the standard of the Insight Journal,
     and the fact that these workshops are being tolerated in this
     occasion, does not reflect any change on the philosophy and
     goals of the Insight Journal.

     There are abundant conferences and papers where these decadent
     practices can be exercised, and there is no need to degrade
     the open space that have been build over the years with the
     Insight Journal.


     We apologize for the confusing that this is causing in the
     ITK community.



C) In the future, when sub-standard events are hosted using the
    Insight Journal web site, a clearly marked differentiation
    will be made, to avoid confusion in the community.




D) In the meantime, please be reassured that the policies of the
    Insight Journal are still:


       1) Only reproducible papers are acceptable

          This imply that papers must include all:

                    - Source code
                    - Image data
                    - Parameters

          needed to replicate the work described in the paper


      2) All papers will be publicly available *immediately* after
         submission, under a Creative Commons by Attribution license
         and will remain publicly available.

      3) Authors keep the copyright of their papers

      4) All readers are allowed and encouraged to post reviews

      5) Review are always public.
         (and only optionally they can be anonymous)

      6) All readers are allowed and welcome to rate reviewers.




Thanks to all of you who have understood the principles of the
Insight Journal and who have contributed with your submissions
and reviews to make of it a useful resource for the ITK community,


With your help, we look forward to make this the standard practice
of publishing in the image analysis field.



      Regards,



         Luis