Robert Apfel, the Robert Higgin Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Yale University, has been named editor of Acoustics Research Letters Online (ARLO), a new electronic journal that publishes the results of research in acoustics, medical ultrasound, animal bioacoustics, acoustic signal processing and architectural acoustics.
ARLO is the second archival journal of the Acoustical Society of America, which has produced the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America since 1929. ARLO is now available at http://asa.aip.org/arlo.
“ARLO will appeal to many researchers because there is a shorter turnaround time from submission to publication,” said Apfel, who is also director of external affairs in the Faculty of Engineering and visiting professor of architecture at Yale.
In addition to a turnaround time of one month — faster than most journals — ARLO boasts a number of other unique features, such as incorporating audio, video and computer animation into articles, and including searching and linking functions. ARLO articles will be available to individual users free of charge.
“ARLO presents a thoughtful and proactive alternative for the distribution of peer reviewed scientific information,” said David E. Stern, director of science libraries and information services of Kline Science Libraries at Yale. “It provides a platform capable of delivering all the possible enhancements of online tools and an inexpensive and efficient peer review support infrastructure. I can only hope other publishers use this scenario as a model for their future products.”
ARLO charges modest fees to authors of accepted manuscripts and to subscribing institutions to support archiving, and the migration of multimedia content to new formats.
Ann Okerson, associate university librarian at Yale and co-owner/moderator of NewJour, an online-moderated announcement forum for new Internet journals, magazines and newsletters, said the economic model for ARLO is imaginative.
“Authors and projects that desire publication shoulder the cost of delivering free content to readers worldwide,” Okerson said. “The Acoustical Society of America is leading the way in exploring new and affordable ways of funding and dissemination of research, thereby benefiting all the players in the scholarly communication chain.”
