SoSyM reflections: the 2020 "State of the Journal" report

When writing the “2019 State of the Journal Report” at this same time last year, we could not have predicted the global changes that would beset us with so many challenges from the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic. Some of us lost loved ones, friends, and colleagues, while the entire world adapted to working from home, participating in remote classrooms, and adopting safety precautions as a new means of daily life. The research community was also affected, with the cessation of travel leading to virtual conferences. Thanks to the heroic efforts of many conference chairs1 adapting to the quick pace of change, scientific discussions continued, but sometimes in a less personable form. Journals also experienced changes with submissions on the rise, but fewer reviewers available to assist with the evaluation because of personal challenges faced by many. Yet, in the presence of a global pandemic, scientific contributions continued in the software and systems modeling community. The number of SoSyM submissions over the past year saw an increase, while the general health of the journal remains strong. Measures put in place recently, such as the second year of moving to six issues per year, have helped to reduce the time to publication significantly. The Open Access movement is also progressing, with Springer announcing new initiatives to make SoSyM publications more accessible to a broader community of researchers. The rest of this editorial summarizes the progress made by the journal during this unprecedented situation. Our hope is that you remain safe and have a productive 2021!


2020 summary statistics
The six SoSyM issues published in 2020 contained 17 Regular papers, 33 Special Section papers, 6 Theme Section papers, 4 Expert Voices, and 9 Guest Editorials. In total, 1587 pages were published in volume 19.
We are very happy to report that the 2-year Impact Factor (IF) for SoSyM continues to be very respectable at 1.876 (previously at 2.66 in 2019 and 1.722 in 2018), with the 5-year IF holding at 1.915. Furthermore, the h-5 Google Scholar ranking places SoSyM at #12 among all conferences and journals related to software engineering and programming languages.
There are two new positive "records" set for SoSyM in 2020 related to submissions and downloads. Over the past year, SoSyM received 372 submissions-the largest number for any year in our history (over 100 submissions over the average of the past three years). Furthermore, at the time of this writing, there were over 164,316 downloads from January through the end of November 2020. This is well beyond the 2019 download numbers (which was also a record at that time) of 136,378. These two observations suggest the growing interest in SoSyM among the research community.
The acceptance rate in 2020 was 19%, which is a respectable rate for a high-quality journal such as SoSyM. The average time from submission to the final decision (accept or reject) has slightly increased to 146 days (128 days in 2019 and 138 days in 2018).
1 3 2 SoSyM's ten-year most influential paper Awards MODELS 2020 was originally planned to be held in Montreal, Canada, but due to the safety concerns with COVID-19, the conference was held virtually in October 2020. We thank the MODELS 2020 organizers (Eugene Syriani and Houari Sahraoui) and the PC co-Chairs (Silvia Abrahão and Juan de Lara) for collaborating with SoSyM. We were able to host another awards session with paper presentations of the Best SoSyM Papers over the past 10 years during a special virtual session of MODELS 2020. The selection was based on the ISI citation index among papers published in SoSyM since 2010. More information about the awards can be found at: http://www.sosym .org/award s/. The SoSyM 2020 "Ten-year most influential Regular paper award" was given to: Jeff Offutt and Ye Wu, "Modeling presentation layers of web applications for testing," In: Journal on Software and Systems Modeling (SoSyM), Volume 9, Issue 2, pp. 257-280, Springer, April 2010.

SoSyM's Journal-First papers at MODELS 2020
The continuous collaboration between SoSyM and the MODELS conference in organizing the SoSyM "Journal-First" was successfully continued. This enables authors of recent SoSyM papers to present their work across the core conference sessions at MODELS. Through this collaboration, SoSyM authors have the opportunity to reach a broader audience to present their work. This also benefits the MODELS conference program by including research talks that explore more depth through analytical and empirical evidence than can be presented in a traditional conference submission. The virtual nature of MODELS 2020 allowed for more SoSyM papers to be selected for presentation. At MODELS 2018, four articles were presented. At MODELS 2019, we increased this number to seven articles and at MODELS 2020 to ten articles (papers that were accepted from July 2019 through June 2020). The SoSyM "Journal-First" papers presented at MODELS 2020 were the following (note: Some of the papers are available online but have not yet received an assignment to an issue): • Yinling Liu, Tao Wang, Haiqing Zhang, and Vincent Cheutet. "An improved approach on the model checking for an agent-based simulation system.

Changes to the editorial board
Each year, Editors who served the SoSyM community for many years retire from the SoSyM Editorship with distinction of service and our deep appreciation. In 2020, Dorina Petriu announced that she desired to step down as an Editor after many years of service. Thanks Dorina for all of your contributions to SoSyM! As mentioned earlier in this report, SoSyM received a record number of submissions this year (372), which requires us to grow the Editorial Board. We are very happy to welcome the following new SoSyM Editors and look forward to working with them in the future.

Reviewers in 2020
A strong research community depends on the efforts of volunteers who help serve as reviewers. The software and systems modeling community has always risen to the request for help from SoSyM. We appreciate all of the help that the reviewers provided in service to the modeling community! We would also like to offer special recognition to the following reviewers, who were recommended as the SoSyM Best Reviewers of 2020, based on the technical depth and feedback provided to authors over the past year-congratulations! We will send a certificate of recognition to each of the following reviewers: