• Submission Form

     Since the first public Linux release in 1991, the culture and practice of computer software research and development have changed dramatically. Rather than producing software products with proprietary rights, many software development projects have opened up their source codes to the public so that they can be studied, used, revised and extended with very few restrictions. The availability of Linux source code, released under the GPL license, makes the Linux kernel technology freely accessible to users, educators, developers, and even software vendors. Although it is not the first open source project, Linux nevertheless confirms the vision and feasibility of sharing knowledge on a global scale. The development of "open" and "free" software products has become an appealing option for many software developers who are willing to share their creations, who desire to see a large number of users benefit from their efforts, or who just wish to gain personal satisfaction and perhaps some recognition for their work.

     It is the last benefit that we hope to offer. The Software Publication Track (SPT) of the Journal of Information Science and Engineering (JISE, http://www.iis.sinica.edu.tw/) aims to provide a formal recognition process for open source software that is truly outstanding and has made a significant contribution. Our goal is to establish a venue in which local and overseas researchers and engineers can publish reports on their innovative and/or popular open source software and receive recognition through a formal academic peer review process. Such recognition is often desirable if people want to continue their projects and research. Such publications may also accelerate the adoption of software beyond the small community accessible by the authors. In addition, for young individuals making open source contributions, the review process may provide valuable feedback from qualified peer reviewers that can help shape the future direction of these projects.

     SPT is a new publication initiative that has never been attempted before. Closest to our idea would be open source hosting sites that have review columns written by editors and public discussion forums. The reviews of software projects in these columns are usually very useful for people who are looking for the right software to adopt for their purposes. However, such reviews are often ad hoc and do not carry much weight in the academic community. Also similar to our idea would be the review columns published in professional magazines such as IEEE Computer and IEEE Software. From time to time, these columns report on well-known, innovative open source projects. But these reports appear only sporadically, and the reviewers are not rigorous in their evaluation criteria. More importantly, in both of the above types of publications, it is the reviewer who writes the article, not the software author(s) themselves. So the publication credit goes to the reviewer, not the software creator. In contrast, SPT will publish manuscripts written by software authors themselves, reporting on technical insights, design decisions, implementation experiences and user feedback concerning the software they have created. It is to complement the software code that has been opened to public, and to allow the software designers to report the design rationale in an academic journal.

     To build up SPT as a successful and credible academic publication, we want to make sure the review process is open and fair. Thus, we need to clearly define the criteria that will be employed in the selection process. However, since this is a new concept, there are very few established guidelines that can be referenced for this purpose. The other difficulty is that many open source software authors are not familiar with the journal publication process and requirements. Thus, some effort will be required to help them put together journal quality reports on their projects. Both of these challenges will require collaborative efforts between editors and authors. At this point, authors are requested to send the following materials so that their reports can be considered for publication:

• The open source code (registered with OSSF http://www.openfoundry.org/ or other open source sites) and its related technical document
• A technical paper (7-15 pages) that includes the following:
  
  • The motivation, design and result of the work
  • Related works and software available in the literature or public domain
  • Major issues and technology challenges
  • The methodology, architecture, algorithms and platform employed in the implementation
  • Performance and experience in software execution
  • A qualitative evaluation of the software and potential improvements
  • Missing features and possible extension of the work

     All submissions will be reviewed by at least three qualified reviewers. The selection criteria for the submitted papers will be based on the following:

• Technical Merit: originality, innovation, soundness, usability, and efficiency
• Contribution Merit: technology criticality, necessity, maturity, and popularity
• Presentation Merit: report organization, readability, clarity, and completeness

     To aid the selection process, JISE has invited a group of truly distinguished scholars and software researchers to join the SPT editorial board. All of these editors have been involved in open source projects in their careers and have experience in developing and managing software projects. We are very happy to have secured their commitment to building up this new journal. With their help and with the support of the authors of open source projects, we hope that SPT will become a vital resource for people who are devoting their efforts to high quality open source projects. In this way, we hope that SPT will make a significant contribution in promoting the open source movement and helping open source projects achieve success.

     The JISE and SPT Call for Papers can be found at: http://www.iis.sinica.edu.tw/

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SPT Editorial Board

Kwei-Jay Lin, University of California, Irvine, USA, SPT Editor-in-Chief Jan-Ming Ho, IIS, Academia Sinica, Taiwan Jane Liu, IIS, Academia Sinica, Taiwan Tei-Wei Kuo, Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Taiwan University, Taiwan Yau-Hwang Kuo, Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Cheng-Kung University, Taiwan Chung-Ta King, Computer Science, National Tsing-Hua University, Taiwan Li-Ming Tseng, Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Central University, Taiwan

SPT Editor-in-Chief

Kwei-Jay Lin received the B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from National Taiwan University in 1976, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of Maryland, College Park, in 1980 and 1985, respectively. He is currently a Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine. He was an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 1985 to 1993. His research interests include service-oriented systems, e-commerce and enterprise computing, real-time systems, scheduling theory, distributed computing and operating systems. He has published more than 150 papers in academic journals and conference proceedings. He is the principal investigator of the RED-Linux project, an open source real-time Linux kernel project.      Dr. Lin is an Associate Editor of the IEEE Trans. on Parallel and Distributed Systems. He has been Co-Chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on E-Commerce since 2004. He was a guest editor for the IEEE Computer Special Issue on Web Services published in October 2003 and the IEEE Software Special Issue on Real-Time Systems Development published in September 1992. He was an Executive Committee Member of the IEEE Technical Committee on Real-Time Systems from 1998 to 2002. He has served on committees for many international conferences and workshops; for example, he was General Chair for the 1998 IEEE Real-Time Systems Symposium held in Madrid, Spain; General Chair for the 2003 IEEE Conference on E-Commerce held in Newport Beach, CA; Program Vice Chair for the 2004 IEEE Conference on Distributed Computing Systems held in Tokyo, Japan; General Co-Chair for the 2004 IEEE Conference on e-Technology, e-Commerce and e-Service (EEE-04) held in Taipei, Taiwan; Program Co-Chair for the 2005 IEEE Conference on E-Commerce held in Munich, Germany; and General Co-Chair for the 2006 IEEE Conference on E-Commerce. Dr. Lin received the 1990 NCR Award of Excellence from the University of Illinois and received the IBM Faculty Research Award twice in 1997 and 1998.

SPT Editors

Jan-Ming Ho received his Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering and computer science from Northwestern University in 1989. He received his B.S. in electrical engineering from National Cheng Kung University in 1978 and his M.S. at Institute of electronics of National Chiao Tung University in 1980. He joined Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica, Taiwan, R.O.C as an associate research fellow in 1989, and is promoted to research fellow in 1994. He visited IBM T. J. Watson Research Center in summer 1987 and 1988, Leonardo Fibonacci Institute for the Foundations of Computer Science, Italy, in Summer 1992, and Dagstuhl- Seminar on "Combinatorial Methods for Integrated Circuit Design", IBFI-Geschaftsstelle, Schlo�G] Dagstuhl, Fachbereich Informatik, Bau 36, Universitat des Saarlandes, Germany, in October 1993. He is a member of IEEE and ACM.      His research interests target at the integration of theoretical and application-oriented research, including mobile computing, P2P computing, multimedia networking, bioinformatics, and knowledge management.      He is Associate Editor of IEEE Transaction on Multimedia.

Jane W.-S. Liu received her doctorate in Electrical Engineering from MIT in 1968. Her doctoral thesis is on quantum-mechanic limitations of optical communication channel. Her research interests include real-time systems, distributed systems, and communication networks.      She served as the chair of the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Data Base Engineering in 1981 and 1982, and the chair of the Technical Committee on Distributed Processing in 1989 and 1990. She was the program committee chair of the 1988 IEEE Reliable Distributed Systems Symposium, the 1990 IEEE Real-Time Systems Symposium and 1995 IEEE 15th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS) and the Vice Chair of Real-Time Systems Track of ICDCS'99. In recent years, she served on program committees of numerous international symposiums in the real-time and embedded systems areas. She was the editor-in-chief of the IEEE Transactions on Computers and an associate editor of the International Real-Time Systems Journal. She is a member of ACM and a Fellow of IEEE.      Dr. Jane W.-S Liu has published more than 150 papers on prestigious conferences and journals. She has also published two books, one on real-time systems and the other on linear system analysis. She has led several development efforts, including a system of building blocks and tools that supports the design, evaluation and validation of real-time systems and kernel-level mechanisms that ensure timing predictability of real-time and embedded applications on open platforms. While at UIUC, she advised 35 Ph.D. students and over 65 MS students, who now work in industry and academia institutes all over the world.      Dr. Jane W.-S. Liu was an architect in the OS Base Core Technology group of Microsoft Corporation from 2000 to 2004. Before joining Microsoft, she was a professor of Computer Science Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 1973 to 2000. She is currently a chair research fellow at Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica.

Tei-Wei Kuo received the B.S.E. degree in Computer Science and Information Engineering from National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan, ROC, in 1986. He received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin in 1990 and 1994, respectively. He was an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering of National Chung Cheng University, Chiayi, Taiwan, between August 1994 and July 2000, and in the Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Taiwan University, between August 2000 and July 2001. He is currently a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan. His research interests include real-time database systems, real-time operating systems, Linux, embedded systems and information servers.      Dr. Kuo is an IEEE senior member. He served as Chair of the Real-Time and Embedded Systems Special Interest Group of the Institute of Information & Computing Machinery (1998-1999). He received the ROC Young Outstanding Person Award in 2004, the Distinguished Research Award from the ROC National Science Council in 2003, the Young Scholar Research Award from Academia Sinica, Taiwan, ROC, in 2001, the Investigative Research Award from the Pan Wen Yuan Foundation, Taiwan, ROC, in 1999, and teaching awards from National Taiwan University in 2003 and 2004. He has been an Associate Editor of the Journal of Real-Time Systems (SCI) since 1998 and a member of the program committees of many international conferences held around the world. He was Program Chair of the Seventh International Conference on Real-Time Computing Systems and Applications (RTCSA 2000), Cheju Island, Korea, December 12-14, 2000; Program Chair of the IEEE Real-Time Technology and Applications Symposium, Taipei, Taiwan, in 2001; and Program Chair for Asia and the Far East of the Ninth International Workshop on Parallel and Distributed Real-Time Systems (WPDRTS 2001) held in San Francisco, USA, in 2001. Since 2003, he has been a member of the Steering Committee of RTCSA. He has written over 100 technical papers that have been published or accepted for publication in international journals and conference proceedings, and he is the author of Real-Time Database Systems: Architecture and Techniques, published by Kluwer Academic Publishers (ISBN 0-7923-7218-2, USA).

Yau-Hwang Kuo was born in Tainan, Taiwan in 1959. He received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Engineering from National Cheng Kung University in 1984 and 1988, respectively.      He was President of the Taiwanese AI Association from 1999 to 2000; Director of the Research Center for Computer System Technology sponsored by the National Science Council, Taiwan, from 1997 to 2000; and Managing Director of the Chinese Fuzzy System Association from 1996 to 2000. He is currently a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, and Director of the Center for Research on E-life Digital Technology at National Cheng Kung University. He is also Director of the Computer Center of the Ministry of Education and Coordinator of the Computer Science and Information Engineering Program of the National Science Council. His research interests include SOC design, network system design, knowledge engineering, computational intelligence and web engineering.

Chung-Ta King received the B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from National Taiwan University, Taiwan, ROC, in 1980 and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan, in 1985 and 1988, respectively. From 1988 to 1990, he was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer and Information Science at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, New Jersey, USA. In 1990, he joined the faculty of the Department of Computer Science, National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan, ROC, where he is currently a Professor. His current research interests include distributed processing and networked embedded systems. He is a member of IEEE.

Li-Ming Tseng received the B.S. degree in Engineering Science and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan, in 1970, 1974, and 1980, respectively. Dr. Tseng is currently a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering of National Central University, Taiwan. His research interests include distribution systems, computer networks, operating systems and resource discovery.