EDITORIAL: Announcing Six TOSEM Issues Per Year

I am pleased to be able to make several announcements with this issue of ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM), including the publication of six issues per year, the addition of new Associate Editors, and the implementation of Registered Papers and Replicated Computational Results (RCR) Reports.

It is a pleasure to share the decision of moving from four to six issues per year. TOSEM has published four issues per year since the beginning in 1992 and has hosted few tens of papers per year till recently. The openings of the fast-impact paper track, continuous special sections, and survey papers has led to a healthy growth of both submissions and papers. The four issues of 2022 host a record number of 85 papers, with a constant growth from the 17 papers published in the four issues of 2017, the bottom number of publications in the 30-years history of TOSEM. The healthy growth of publications per issue cannot prevent the growth of the backlog of accepted papers and the consequent time to publication. Six issues per year allows TOSEM to keep a small publication backlog and timely publish new and exciting results as soon as the papers are accepted.

It is with great pleasure that I welcome Silvia Abrahão, Aldeida Aleti, Marcel Böhme, Shin-Hwei Tan, Yang Liu, and Giuseppe Scanniello as new TOSEM Associate Editors. Silvia, Aldeida, Marcel, Shin-Hwei, Yang, and Giuseppe will contribute to strengthening the already excellent TOSEM editorial board with new areas of expertise and enthusiasm, and they will help us manage the new Registered Papers and RCR Reports and the growing number of papers submitted to TOSEM which has grown dramatically in the past three years.

I am proud to announce the implementation of Registered Papers (https://dl.acm.org/journal/tosem/registered-papers). Registered Papers offer a two-stage review process to encourage the exploration of risky ideas and facilitate the publication of valuable negative results. In the first stage, authors submit papers that present new ideas, the methodology to be used to obtain the study results, and a feasibility study; reviewers focus on the novelty and significance of the idea, rather than the results. In the second stage, authors submit a full paper including the results of the study; reviewers assess only whether the paper follows the agreed methodology and the results are correctly interpreted. Registered Papers provide early feedback and revisions of the proposed methodology, and they eliminate publication bias, where authors are inclined to selectively publish only positive results, confirmation bias, where reviewers might give more credence to results that support their own views, and impact bias, where reviewers might give novel results more consideration. I would like to express my gratitude to Cristian Cadar for seeding the idea of Registered Papers and accepting to start up the new paper type as guest Editor-in-Chief and to Marcel Böhme, Abhik Roychouhury, and Burak Turham for joining the guest Registered Paper editorial board.

I am also happy to announce Replicated Computational Results (RCR) Reports (https://dl.acm.org/journal/tosem/replicated-computational-results). RCR reports describe the artifacts that are related to the results that are presented in papers published in TOSEM and that are made available on archives that satisfy the FAIR Principles, Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reuse. We will encourage all authors of TOSEM papers to share data and artifacts to improve the ability to replicate results, foster fair comparison of novel ideas with the state of the art, facilitate the reuse of data and artifacts in the community, and promote independent and comparative evaluations of approaches and tools. We will require authors of Registered Papers to make the data and artifacts publicly available and document them in RCR reports. I would like to express my gratitude to Marcel Böhme for accepting to start up RCR Reports as guest Editor-in-Chief for Registered Papers and to Silvia Abrahão, Yang Liu, and Giuseppe Scanniello for joining the guest RCR Report editorial board.