The struggles of OSTRICH and PoDiGG

The story of two journal articles

• 
  Triple Storage for Random-Access Versioned Querying of RDF Archives
  Ruben Taelman, Miel Vander Sande, Joachim Van Herwegen, Erik Mannens, Ruben Verborgh
  In Journal of Web Semantics (JWS) (2018)
• 
  Generating Public Transport Data based on Population Distributions for RDF Benchmarking
  Ruben Taelman, Pieter Colpaert, Erik Mannens, Ruben Verborgh
  In Semantic Web Journal (SWJ) (2018)

OSTRICH: a tool for RDF versioning

• Project: COMBUST (icon)
• Goal: Efficient storage and querying of Linked Data through a TPF interface
• Research: Storage technique, query algorithms
• Development: OSTRICH (C++), OSTRICH-Node (JavaScript)
• Final article: 35 pages
  (related work: 5, approach: 11, evaluation 4, figures: 13)

PoDiGG: a tool for generating public transport datasets

• Project: HOBBIT (H2020)
• Goal: Realistic mimicking of public transport datasets for benchmarking
• Research: Mimicking algorithm based on population distributions
• Development: PoDiGG (JavaScript)
• Final article: 22 pages
  (related work: 3, approach: 8, evaluation 4, figures: 3)

Journal of Web Semantics (JWS)

• Publisher: Elsevier
• Impact factor: 1.348
• Special issue: Managing the Evolution and Preservation of the Data Web (MEPDaW)
• Open access: no (allows self-publishing)
• ~HTML friendly: HTML -> Word

Semantic Web Journal (SWJ)

• Publisher: IOS Press
• Impact factor: 2.224
• Special issue: Benchmarking Linked Data
• Open access: yes
• Two-strike rule

Timeline

Journal	Journal of Web Semantics (JWS)	Semantic Web Journal (SWJ)
Type	HTML	LaTeX
Submitted	September 13, 2017	February 27, 2017
Reviews	2 (major, minor)	2 (major, minor)
Accepted	August 16, 2018	July 21, 2018
Published	September 3, 2018	/
Time until acceptance	11 months	17 months

How we handled the reviews

1. Create a shared Google doc containing all the reviews.
2. Highlight all important/relevant parts of the reviews.
3. Create tasks, ordered by importance.
4. Decide which tasks will be done, and which won't.
5. Execute all tasks
6. Write a reply letter based on all executed tasks.

OSTRICH: Review 1

• Decision: Major revision
• Reviews received: January 17 2018 (after 4 months)
• Revision deadline: February 28 2018 (after 1,5 months)
• Reviewers: 3
• Main comments: Too long, lacking technical details, insufficient comparisons
• Revision: Shortened related work, new formalisms

OSTRICH: Review 2

• Decision: Minor revision
• Reviews received: May 14 2018 (after 2,5 months)
• Revision deadline: May 30 2018 (after 2 weeks) (accepted 2 months later)
• Reviewers: 3 (1 one new)
• Main comments: typo's, confusing parts

PoDiGG: Review 1

• Decision: Major revision
• Reviews received: November 22 2017 (after 9 months)
• Revision deadline: January 24 2018 (after 2 months; originally 1,5 months)
• Reviewers: 3 (major, major, minor)
• Main comments: Motivate population distributions, motivate evaluation baseline
• Revision: Improvement of motivations and a bunch of minor comments

PoDiGG: Review 2

• Decision: Minor revision
• Reviews received: May 22 2018 (after 4 months)
• Revision deadline: June 24 2018 (after 1 month) (accepted 1 month later)
• Reviewers: 3 (minor, minor(new), reject(new))
• Main comments: Title, motivate usages, scope of references
• Revision: New title, updated discussion on usages, updating references

Lessons learned

• Journal publication is a slow process.
• Writing for journals is more rewarding than writing for conferences.
• JWS is more professional than SWJ.
• Reviewers always want you to do more.
• Reviewers always want you to write less.
• Reviewers contradict each other.
• You can say no to reviewers.