The number of articles submitted and accepted for publication in the Landslides journal continuously increased from the first year of publishing until now. The Landslides journal started in 2004 as a three-monthly journal (four issues per volume) with approximately 100 pages per issue. An increased number of accepted articles accompanied a change from three to bi-monthly publication of the Landslides journal in 2013 with 100 pages per issue (Vol. 10, Issues No. 1-4). The further rise of accepted articles resulted from increasing the number of the pages per issue to 150 pages from Vol. 10. Issues No. 4-5 and to 200 pages per issue from Vol. 11 Issue No. 3 in 2014. A rise in the number of submitted articles followed the increasing Impact Factor and the number of accepted manuscripts in the second half of 2016 indicates a necessary new increase in printed pages per issue.
Categories of Articles
Landslides published four major categories of articles:
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Original Papers (6–12 pages): original research and investigation results;
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Technical Note (less than 6 pages): research notes, review notes, case studies, progress of technology, and best practices;
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Recent Landslides (generally less than 6 pages): reports of recent landslides, including location (latitude/longitude), plan, section, geology, volume, movement, mechanism, and disasters within the available extent; in monitoring, testing, investigation, and mitigation measures; and
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International Consortium on Landslides (ICL)/International Programme on Landslides (IPL) Activities (length depending on the content): progress of IPL projects and ICL Committee activities.
The categories of Original paper and Technical note are the same as in other scientific journals. The category of Recent Landslides is unique to Landslides and carries on the tradition begun by the Landslide News (1987–2003), an international newsletter published by the Japan Landslide Society (Sassa et al. 2009, 2015). The International Consortium on Landslides aims to contribute to the United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction through developing landslide sciences, technology, and capacity building, and strengthening global cooperation for landslide risk reduction within developed and developing countries. The ICL established the International Programme on Landslides (IPL), together with ICL supporting organizations (UNESCO, UNISDR, WMO, FAO, UNU, ICSU, WFEO, and IUGS). These activities are reported in ICL/IPL Activities (Sassa et al. 2015).
Classification of Articles
The submission of a manuscript to the Landslides journal should be only electronic through the Landslides Editorial Manager (EM) managed by Springer Nature. When an article needs to be submitted through the Landslides Editorial Manager, the author is requested to classify the manuscript based on a list of article classifications (see Table 5). Starting from Vol. 10 (2013), the current article classification has four major classes: Background Science, Methodology, Application and Types of Landslides. An author can chose one or more classes for the submitted manuscript.
Table 5 Classification of articles
Editorial Process
Each article submitted to the Landslides journal should be uploaded in the Editorial Manger (EM) as a New assignment article. New assignment articles are passed to Executive Editors, who are requested to upload their opinions of whether the article should be passed to in-depth review or rejected without in-depth review, and whether contributed category and page length are appropriate or not.
Executive Editors organize editorial meetings every week by Skype and decide the assignment of a handling Editor for each article passed for in-depth review. The handling Editors are assigned from a database of around 100 registered Editors in Editorial Manager (EM), identifying classifications attached to their research area. The handling Editor will assign one or two Reviewers, depending on the article’s category, from the database of around 950 registered Reviewers in Editorial Manager, with their personal classifications. Reviewers are searched by classification matching. The handling Editor’s recommendation, based on results of conducted reviews for each article, will be uploaded to EM. The Editor-in-Chief will then make a final decision, mostly following the handling Editor’s recommendations. During the peer review process, submitted manuscripts go through one or more revision stages leading up to final acceptance or rejection. The editorial status summary is presented in Table 6 (Schwarz and Mannsperger 2016). The table summarizes the activity for the journal office between January 1st and December 31st of each year, but 0nly “Original Submissions” have been taken into account. From Table 6 it is clearly visible that there has been a continuous rise in submitted manuscripts and also that the acceptance and rejection rates have been almost identical during the last three years (and before). The rejection rate for a year is calculated as the number of rejected manuscripts this year compared to the total number of decisions in the year, which is defined here as the number of rejected manuscripts plus the number of accepted manuscripts. The term Reject is used for the calculation of the acceptance and rejection rates, which includes all terms that may exist for rejection decisions: Reject before review; Reject after review; Reject, but resubmit; Reject, out of scope; and so forth. Only the papers for which the Final Disposition Date has been set are taken into account. Final disposition date means that a manuscript is fully completed (Schwarz and Mannsperger 2016).
Table 6 Editorial status summary 2013-2015 (Schwarz and Mannsperger 2016)
One of important tasks for the Editorial Board is to reduce the peer review process to enable publishing of an article as soon as possible. The longest period from submission to the final decision was a maximum of around one year. The Editorial Board is making efforts to reduce this period to 6 months. The average time between submission of the article and publication is presented in Fig. 2 (Schwarz and Mannsperger 2016).
It is clear in Fig. 1 that peer review time has decreased continuously during the last three years, but the time for publishing an article after Springer’s Online First® is very long, although this period is becoming shorter.
The publication of accepted articles via Springer’s Online First® is very important and enables internet readers to view the article soon after final acceptance. Articles published via Springer’s Online First® service are final articles published online after an author has reviewed proofs and all corrections have been carried out. Metadata is sent to all relevant bibliographic services for inclusion in abstracting and indexing databases immediately after online publication. Articles are published on the SpringerLink platform in PDF format and only final pagination and the citation line are later added in the printed version. Articles are fully citable by their DOI (Digital Object Identifier) and the official publication date is the online publication date. Publication of papers through Springer’s Online First® helps shorten the time between publication and citation (Schwarz and Mannsperger 2016).
Article Downloading
While accepted articles are available to the readers after publishing via Springer’s Online First® service, article downloading is an important way for disseminating article results. The downloading of Landslides articles is rapidly increasing in last three years, which also indicates the high quality of the accepted and published articles (Fig. 3).
The top 10 most downloaded Landslides’ articles in 2015, according to Institute for Scientific Information, ISI, are listed in Table 7.
Table 7 Top 10 most downloaded Landslides articles in 2015 according to Institute for Scientific Information, ISI