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Some ideas for a possible new journal

Wenbin Yu's picture

Inspired by the discussion with Mike Ciavarella on http://imechanica.org/node/22012, I am thinking about a journal with the following attributes:

1.Has its own arXiv service so that submitted papers become instantly public. I can see three benefits of doing this: 1) instant copyright protection. The authors do not have to worry that somebody (or possible reviewers) might steal their ideas; 2) the community can provide some feedbacks for improvement even before the paper goes through a more "rigorous" peer review; 3) reduce the possibility of duplicating effort. Since the paper is instantly available, it should discourage those who are working on very similar ideas to either stop re-inventing the wheels or to improve on it. I know there is a general arXiv server (https://arxiv.org/). I am not sure how many in my field (I am in engineering) are using it for uploading pre-published papers or watching for new ideas. If such an arXiv service is associated with a particular journal, many of us who are interested in that journal might want to get alerts of those papers too. There is one side effect and I don't know whether it is good or bad. It will reduce the number of re-submissions, thus # of papers we need to review and publish, because if a paper, already publically available through one journal's arXiv, is not accepted for official publication, the authors will not simply resubmit to another journal without significant revision to address the deficiencies.  

 

2.Public peer review comments and author responses and editorial correspondence. The reviewers will remain anonymous for obvious reasons. The rest of the community can comment on comments/responses/correspondence, etc after the paper is accepted and in final shape. This transparency and the community "scrutiny” can motivate the reviewers/editors/authors to be more professional and objective. This way, we retain the complete story of the paper and the peer review comments/author responses can help us understand the paper better. Since it is also open to community scrutiny after publication, it will encourage more rigorous scholarship. 

 

3.Impact factor for individual paper based on some type of metrics (review scores, citations, comments/reviews/votes from the community, etc.) 

 

I know there are many editors and authors on this website. I will greatly appreciate any of your comments/thoughts. If you know any journal in our field has some of the similar attributes, please let me know. Thanks a lot!

 

Comments

Emilio Martínez Pañeda's picture

Interesting discussion, thank you Wenbin (and Mike) for bringing this up. 

My feeling is that more and more mechanicians upload their papers to arXiv before submitting to a journal but we are still far from other fields. 

Examples of journals that piggyback on arXiv can be found in mathematics or astrophysics (see http://www.nature.com/news/open-journals-that-piggyback-on-arxiv-gather-...). Here at Cambridge, we have the journal Discrete Analysis that relies on that type of system.  

These initiatives are fantastic but with funding agencies relying heavily on metrics (namely, impact factor) it is difficult for new journals to flourish. They need continuous support from strong academics in the field (like in the case of Extreme Mechanics Letters). In any case, I do not want to sound pessimistic - the opportunity is there and I will be happy to support it as much as possible.

Emilio Martínez Pañeda​

Wenbin Yu's picture

I know more and more mechanicians are using arXiv, but not many people are paying serious attention. I don't want to piggyback on arXiv, I want the journal has its own arXiv (the papers listed there can be submitted to other journals). It is kind of early view of papers before accepted. Note, in the past, we don't have early view of accepted paper and we have to wait for the hard copy and the complete issue. It definitely speeds up knowledge sharing. 

Metrics will come with strong community. EML is an excellent example for how a journal can quickly establish its reputation. 

Emilio Martínez Pañeda's picture

I see your point, but running something like arXiv has a cost (at least, in the way that arXiv works now). That is why I thought it will be easier to piggyback on arXiv. Of course, as you mention, there are some disadvantages (if the repository is "local" it will attract more attention) but also some advantages (with a local repository, you are somehow making rejections public). In any case, it is a very good idea and it may be more appropriate using a local repository as arXiv is not fully established yet in our community.

Emilio Martínez Pañeda​

Wenbin Yu's picture

I believe it will elimiate the concern of making rejection public if the Journal arXiv is set up so that the author can decide when to send paper for peer review and they have the option to submit to other journals. In other words, those e-prints are not automatically send for peer reviews. It is debatable whether making rejection public is bad or good. However, many reputable journals are also asking the author to provide the submission history of this paper.

Mike Ciavarella's picture

..it remains difficult to raise a new journal, either traditional or innovative.  The growth of traditional journals perhaps hasn't stopped yet, and of course first or later we will move to new forms, as the previous system is on the verge of collapse.   But it is difficult to predict.   You need to put serious effort into this, and maybe the reward will be great.   I am involved in many battles in italian academia, in science, and if I find energy, I will help you too.  But it is not simple!

Try to contact my friend Vladislav YASTREBOV <vladislav.yastrebov@mines-paristech.fr>

and join a very similar French discussion-group about creating an open-access journal in mechanics:

https://www.loomio.org/invitations/aa0a97be9a80ba509623

 

This discussion was initiated by Mathias Legrand and Vincent Acary on the Mecamat mailing list, now it moved to a dedicated web-page (the link above).

 

If you could be interested by such an initiative, please join them.

 

Wenbin Yu's picture

Epi-journal tries to reduce the APC cost charged to the authors by normal OA journals by leveraging arXiv. However, I think the major benefit for arXiv is instant copyright protection, idea sharing, community feedback before going through peer review. Making it localized in a journal make these benfits more relevant.  I don't think that there are much expenses to host a local arXiv. I am currently running a free platform (cdmHUB.org) for anybody to upload any information (including papers, data, computer codes), run simulation, and even request a linux workstation. And also a better metric can be constructed for the paper than impact factor and citations using the big-data associated with the paper. Publishing reviews and responses makes the story more complete. 

Mike Ciavarella's picture

But maybe I am wrong.

Start finding the editorial board.  The exact mechanism is not so important.  The huge effort is to convince people to send papers there.

In Italy we are now crazy about having citations in scopus, measuring h-index in scopus, and so on.  Starting a journal from scratch, how do you think to build your reputation, just because of the technological innovations?   In the short term, you need to have impact factor, DOI, and scopus links and indexing.

Give this point the highest priority and THEN all other aspects.   Have major players support your ideas.  Start by convincing some big conference organizers.

Why not for example launching this idea in the BOLOGNA Euromech conference?  Zhigang Suo is a big invited lecturer there, and all the other organizers, I know them well.  The conference is huge, and I could try to investigate.  In fact, I already asked Davide Bigoni about some similar ideas, and even Zhigang if I remember well, but both declined as they are too busy.

So be prepared that you need to do all your homework!    http://www.euromech.org/conferences/ESMC/ESMC10 

Wenbin Yu's picture

I agree that getting the community together to support your idea and send in papers is not easy. However, exact mechanism is important, because the mechanism dedicates the software infrastructure.  Epi-journal is an easy mechanism, but it is only slight improve over OA journal because most expenses of OA journals do not come from electronic hosting these papers. 

There are two aspects to a journal: the technology and the sociology (and their associated costs). 

Hosting a journal (e.g., on Amazon Web Services - S3) carries a cost that is a function of the number of users and downloads.  That cost can be a complex nonlinear function and needs to be computed using reasonable assumptions.  I've found that cdmHub.org is too slow to use from my location in NZ and I'm not sure how scalable the technology is.  However, the technology is the easy part.

More important is the sociology.  Academic publication is tied to reputations, grants, promotions etc. in Academia.  Unless that changes I don't see the need for another journal in Mechanics.  On the other hand, a preprint server could go a long way towards rapid dissemination of ideas.  Because most people accept new ideas only after someone they respect has adopted the idea (of if the idea is so compelling and has so much adoption that they don't have a choice), I think even a preprint server for mechanics (and general engineering) will need a lot of marketing to gain acceptance.  I see that as at least a 10 year process.

-- Biswajit

Wenbin Yu's picture

I agree that more important is sociology. Change that is hard and it requires those who are already estalished and do not have to chase after those things you mentioned to try better publication models if we truly believe such models exist. 

Regarding the speed of cdmHUB, does it take too long to load the web pages, or is it too slow to run simulation codes remotely? The speed is mainly related with the internet speed. We are constantly improving the site, your more specific inputs will be helpful. I have used cdmHUB to conduct workshops in Italy before with 20+ students in a classroom fighting for wifi, I do notice that the speed goes down. The scalablity of the technology is (or at least should be) determined by the internet speed at the user end. 

It's been a while, but I recall that the website took a while to load.  The scalability is determined by the capacity of the server to accept a large number of users simultaneously and the efficiency of the server side software.  I can access most commercial sites worldwide at high speeds.  It's academic sites that turn out to have speed bottlenecks.  On the positive side, I can at least access your site; unlike the Luxembourg (Bordas) site. iMechanica is also relatively slow.

-- Biswajit

 

Wenbin Yu's picture

Dear Biswajit, Thanks a lot for your feedback. We are in the process to move cdmHUB to AWS, hoping it will be faster internationally. We did not notice its slowing down at home in US. 

 

Mike Ciavarella's picture

If you are a real entrepeneur, maybe you are the next Robert Maxwell, forget about academia:  all academics of the world are somehow naive people who all worked for a single man and his huge profits.   Maybe you will be the next one....   If this is your idea, and you want to abandon academia, then I am interested :)

It is an industry like no other, with profit margins to rival Google – and it was created by one of Britain’s most notorious tycoons: Robert Maxwell. By Stephen Buranyi

 

Wenbin Yu's picture

What amazed me is that many scientists complain about it but go ahead doing it anyway. Internet has distroyed many traditional business and old institutions, but not scientific publishing. Maybe someday the institution of university will be destroyed, then the current model of scientific publishing will die along with it. 

Emilio Martínez Pañeda's picture

I share your views and I will be happy to support your initiative Wenbin. Ultimately, success will depend on the ability to bring strong players on board.

In any case, I do believe that there will be short and medium-term changes in scientific publishing. Countries like Germany (https://www.projekt-deal.de/about-deal/) are already having strong negotiations with Elsevier and other major publishers. A few years ago our institutions did not have a choice - librarians had to pay whatever publishers asked for. Now, with sci-hub, arXiv and institutional repositories we are actually able to do our work without the need for any subscription - librarians can take a tougher stand in these negotiations. 

Wenbin Yu's picture

Thanks, Emilio.  I will try to see how to sell some of these ideas to strong players in my field (composite materials).

You mentioned sci-hub, I would like your opinion about sharing. If most of us are willing to share, then there is no need for subscription by the libraries. ResearchGate has such a mechanism, I have send my papers to hundreds of people who requested so far. Or manybe if we make the sharing much easier, subscription-based journals will lose its appeal.  

Emilio Martínez Pañeda's picture

Good luck in your endeavour Wenbin, it is a very good idea and I will try to do my best to support it.

Regarding sharing. I very actively share my manuscripts on as many platforms as possible (arXiv, repositories, ResearchGate, etc.). Our institutions may have access to all the journals that we are interested in but we need to think about those with fewer resources and make sure they can follow and contribute to scientific progress. In Europe, all research must be open access by 2020. This is typically done through institutional repositories (green open access model) after the journals' embargo period. Implying that, if willing to wait 12-24 months, one could have access to all papers without subscription and independently of other resources (Sci-Hub, ResearchGate, arXiv, etc.). When I started doing research I did most of my literature reviews by searching keywords in Web of Science or Scopus. I see that all the PhD students do it now in Google Scholar, where all the versions of the manuscript can be easily found (repositories, arXiv, even ResearchGate and the like).

Mike Ciavarella's picture

I raised a big criticism against a big publisher, I do not want to mention which one, on imechanica.  As a result, I was thrown out of the editorial board of a few journals.  If you search imechanica maybe you find this.  Some editors even claimed that I was defaming them, and obviously do not accept any papers from me.  I will avoid mentioning the name of the Editors of the journals, but I could do it privately if you want.

I suppose i was just ahead of time.......

Mike Ciavarella's picture

a paper I have hard time to publish is the following

A critical assessment on Kassapoglou's statistical model for composites fatigueCiavarellaV Vinogradov, G Carbone - arXiv preprint arXiv:1310.1455, 2013 - arxiv.org Can you explain me why?  It is of course quite critical, but after I put it on arXiv in 2013 and sent it to 3-4 journals, I gave up, also because composites fatigue is not my main interest.Now, I am trying again to publish it.  But it seems it is hard to find reviewers.  Can you explain me why?

I started posting papers on arXiv in the early 2000s but have found that not too many mechanics people read arXiv papers (or cite them).  That's probably because of lack of awareness.  A dedicated server for mechanics papers would help a bit (people have to search in condensed matter physics/mathematics/computer science on arxiv for mechanics papers).

I've heard many "experts" on composites in NZ say that there is no fatigue in polymer composites.  Maybe that's why you don't get reviewers?   Or you may have annoyed a few people and will have to wait until they retire?

-- Biswajit

Wenbin Yu's picture

Biswajit, composites can fatigue and we are working a project entitled multiscale fatigue damage of composites right now. Composite fatigue life is much longer than metals though for many applications, that might cause the conclusion that composites do not fatigue. 

Wenbin Yu's picture

Mike, changes usually require sacrifices, which is exactly many would like to continue with the way it is. 

Mike Ciavarella's picture

Wenbin

I posted that paper to "test" you as "innovative" editor.  Please let me see how the review process would go.  Find 3-4 reviewers and posted the reviews anonimous here on imechanica.  Let us see how it works.  To convince people, you need to make practical examples and experiments, as in papers you know!

So I wait for your excercise.  

Wenbin Yu's picture

Mike, how to post comments on imechanica anonyomously? 

Mike Ciavarella's picture

it is so simple, like editors do!

Wenbin Yu's picture

Actually, if you upload your paper on cdmHUB.org as a publication, users can perform anonymously directly. Cut and paste is something for computers, it is not good use of an editor's time :)

Mike Ciavarella's picture

And later I can also send it to a proper journal?   And people would see the reviews of my papers, or only I could do it?  

Please explain step by step --- not everybody understand:  at least, I don't.

Anyway, I see you don't want to make my experiment.  I was hoping it would attract attention.

Wenbin Yu's picture

Yes, you can send it to a proper journal later and you only give us the rights to display it (like what you did with arXiv). I can invite experts in composite fatige damage to review your paper. Others who have a cdmHUB account can also review it. The review comments are public.

You signup a free account, then, click Resources->Contribute, select Publications. then you follow the rest of the steps, by putting title, abstracts, and tags, then upload the pdf as an attachment. My admin will approve your submission.

Can you tell me what you want to achieve with your experiment? To see whether somebody would like to review your paper and give you some feedback for improving the paper so that you can make it ready for journal publication or to test whether I can get somebody to review your paper anonyously? 

Mike Ciavarella's picture

for a proper journal?

Just today, I finished a big review paper with 35 or so authors which took us endless discussions and even personal attacks -- it was extremely difficult task.   One of the authors was extremely agressive and made 12 pages of "internal review" which took us ages to answer and converge, DESPITE the external standard reviewer asked only for MINOR review.

So in my case, why would I want to submit to your system, if the paper is already on ArXiv for everyone to see it --- but nobody takes it for serious unless is peer reviewed?  Why would I send it to your other system which supposedly makes peer review, and how you convince reviewers to work for a non high reputation journal?

I get dozens of emails a day to review papers from low class journals, which I don't even reply to. 

If you want your system to provide external reviews for people to improve their papers, then ArXiv is good enough.  I can share it to many places, like I did already, and people usually read it, and few of them comment to me.

Yes, I was hoping to make instead another experiment:  if you could review that particular paper on imechanica for me, and see if anybody takes this discussion for serious.  I promise you, it is a good experiment, because the paper is quite critical and you will have hard time to find good reviewers, who make good reviews.

But I am sure you don't want to avoid this "test" --- try!

Wenbin Yu's picture

Mike, original post was to seek suggestions from the community to come up with a better way of publication. cdmHUB has not implemented my ideas yet. Currently it can serve as a Composites arXiv with review capability. It expose you to a focused community with the possibility to provide feedback on the same site, comparing to arXiv. Researchers in some fields do take arXiv seriously. Somebody paid serious attention to award Grigori Perelman a Fields Medal. 

I have difficulty to see the connection of reviewing your paper with my original suggested ideas. 

Wenbin,

I agree with you on that.  In mathematics and some subfield of physics, arxiv submissions are taken very seriously.  That's probably because results can be verified by readers and, if found inaccurate, papers have been known to be withdrawn from the repository.  The same is true of computer science, e.g., all major deep learninng papers are published on arxiv first.  That allows people to know what's being done and allows for all sorts of views to be heard, instead of just academic views.  

Personally, I've seen a huge difference in the attitude of reviewers between when I was in academia and when I was in industry.  Reviewers tend to dismiss work that's done inside industry; and I think that reflects poorly on mechanics researchers. It also removes feedback to researchers on what's considered important in industry and where there are gaps in knowledge.

-- Biswajit

Hi Wenbin,

If you can get hold of the funds, I'd suggest you try to expand cdmHub to include more fields of mechanics.  An example of a very successful recent model is bioarxiv https://www.biorxiv.org/about-biorxiv.  You could contact the leeaders of that effort to find out how they approached the problem and what issues they ran into.

-- Biswajit

Wenbin Yu's picture

Hi, Biswajit, thanks a lot for the information. I will take a look. I like your idea that we try to expand cdmHUB to include more fields of mechanics. I need to convince my stake holder first. I am glad that you like the arXiv idea. 

Mukunda Madhava Nath's picture

This is a very interesting idea. Mechanical engineering and mechanics is a very closed door discipline compared to computer science. It will not be an exaggeration to say that the whole open source movement is at the forefront of the rapid progress of computer science. 

Mike Ciavarella's picture

Then I am confused.  I still do not understand what is better

 

1) is it cheaper?   But the little money given to editors for hard work, and for typesetters to improve papers, although a small part of the big margin Elsevier and other companies make, is needed to ensure high quality

 

2) is it faster?  Most journals are fast these days

 

3) do I get a more proper peer review?   Why?  Most journals even of high reputation, have troubles to find high quality reviewers, and I know many scientists of even high level (not perhaps of high ethical standards) who review papers in few seconds, saying this is wrong, because I did it much better 2 years ago.

 

So please recap which one is better.

Mike,

1a) Cheaper:  Cheaper for whom?  I have to pay USD 50 to read a typical paper which may or may not have any information that's useful.  So it's definitely not cheaper for me.  Also, many academics appear to be bombared by e-mail nowadays and requests for papers have recently started to go unanswered.  So the old approach of asking for papers does not work any longer. 

1b) Editors' hard work:  The failure to find reviewers indicates that editors are not actually working that hard to find people.  They just look at the list of references and send out requests to people instead to exapnding their networks to a larger group of non-academics.  What makes you think that non-academics are not knowledgable just because they don't have the incentive to publish as frequently as academics.  In my experience, particularly in engineering, many non-academics are much more knowledgable about their fields than academics.

1c) Typesetters improving papers:  I do all the typesetting of my papers myself and design figures and tables myself too.  Elsevier's typesetters are well known for destroying equations and one has to go and recheck everything twice to make sure things are OK.  Maybe typesetters help improve Nature papers, but definitely not regular journal papers.

2) Faster:  I sent a paper to IJSS a few years ago and the editor sat on it for two years and finally sent it back saying it was unsuitable for the journal.  In the mean time, that person published a very similar paper in the same journal.  No, mechanics journals are not fast enough unless the authors and editors know each other.  Not all of us have the resources or the time to create such a network by visiting numerous conferences each year and publishing numerous papers.

3) Peer review:  I've had many peer reviews where it was clear that the reviewer didn't know what they were talking about (or had given up reading after the first few pages).  The only way to fix this problem is to broaden the pool of reviewers by creating connections with more academics and researchers outside academia.  Every review that I do takes at least a day and I don't get any reputation points for doing that, but I still review papers because I get to know about the latest thinking in the subfield.

Keep in mind that for every faculty member at a university, there are at least 50 PhDs who are working in industry.  It's your job as academics to keep in tough with these students of yours and increase the pool of reviewers.  And I'm sure academics can easily come up with more creative solutions instead of complaining about quality (after all the quality of your students reflects your quality) of reviewers available.

-- Biswajit

Mike Ciavarella's picture

Since I am not sure which system would solve the many issues you raise.

The editor of IJSS would not be happy of your statement, it is offensive.  Since I know one of them, it must be the other, the one in US, who is the same who asked me to be out of the editorial board?

I've been out of the publishing game for many years now and don't read IJSS any longer.  So I don't know who the current editors are.  But I was mildly amused by my experience; and I didn't find it surprising given my experiences in departmental faculty meetings.

I think a starting point would be to actively expand the pool of reviewers (whether it is for a new journal or for an existing one).  A repository that specializes in mechanics would be helpful for people like me (and I hope people interested in knowledge and understanding in general).  But that will need money and resources; and some creative thinking by younger people.  Keep in mind that arxiv is now more than 20 years old.

-- Biswajit

Mike Ciavarella's picture

my test.  You are in composites, you are working on a proposals in composites fatigue, and you haven't had any comment on my Kassapoglou paper.  I know this is a little off-topic, but not so much after all.  Your technology will not change the rule of the game:  you need to find time to read the paper in details, as Editor, to find good reviewers (and on that subject in general there are only 10 or so in the world, and most of them are not willing to do the job).

So, for me the discussion is getting boring.  You don't want to comment yourself on the Kassapoloug's arxiv paper, not even to tell me why it failed to pass the traditional system of journals, then I loose interest in your proposal, and I wish you good luck.

Hi Mike,

Don't want to interrupt your discussion with Wenbin, but couldn't help jumping in.  

I can assure you there are many more than 10 people that work on composite fatigue.  It's just that these difficult problems are not of interest in academia.  As I have said several times, editors will need to expand their list of contacts to find these people.

Another observation is that if a paper has not garnered much interest in several years maybe the results are not of interest per se.  The publication process is supposed to weed out uninteresting results from the literature.  In that case, why burden the editorial process further?

I'm sure those who need those results have already downloaded the paper from arxiv and used the results.  It's just that you don't see them citing it.  So one has to be clear whether the goal is the dissemination of knowledge or improving one's citation count.

Enough discussion for now; need to get back to debugging :)

-- Biswajit

Wenbin Yu's picture

Mike, as I said previously, I have difficulty to figure out the connection between reviewing your paper and my proposed journal ideas. I am not seeing that getting good reviews is easy, but my proposed ideas should help getting better reviews because these reviews will be seen by the community and benefit the community. Comparing to the epi-journal what you have proposed in another thread (epi-journals just cut down storage cost by piggybacking arXiv, which is not much and cdmHUB provided it for free anyway), I thought that these ideas offer further improvements. 

Mike Ciavarella's picture

Reviews are hardly the quality of journal papers. There is a service already to publish reviews, I forget the name, but there is.

Yes, you don't see the connection with reviewing my paper.  The point is theory to practice.  At the moment, your ideas are theories. Maybe good one, but I don't buy them, until I see them at work in practical example.  And I gave you an example, which you refuse to consider.

This is for me good enough.  You don't prove your ideas, then we are talking of commercial inventions.

Wenbin Yu's picture

I did not say review accurately reflects the quality of papers. But review scores should somehow reflect the quality of the paper if we still have confidence in peer review. Yes, there are journals publishing reviews, see http://retractionwatch.com/2017/11/27/make-reviews-public-says-peer-revi...

I hate to repeat, but I have to say that your test is not related with my theory. What your test can find out is whether somebody would like to give opinions on a paper uploaded on arXiv in a public forum setting, my theory is whether the proposed ideas (localized arXiv, public but anonymous reviews/responses, and better metrics measuring paper impacts) work better for journal publication. In fact, your own comment already disclose that you have seen practical examples: you proposed epi-journals using a global arXiv (local arXiv is a refinement); you already know some journals publish reviews. Then, you have to provide other reasons for dismissing these ideas for a meaningful discourse. 

Mike Ciavarella's picture

It is not very meaningful if only you and I discuss.  Let us see opinion of others.  At present, me and you are at a dead end, not worth going on.

Mike Ciavarella's picture

See an example here  

http://imechanica.org/node/22108

This describes in summary the attempt to use roughness to interpret friction. 

I argue that we haven't made any progress since the times of Leonardo da Vinci.

Does your new system stop this proliferation of papers, or makes it even worse?

Mike Ciavarella's picture

Has 1700 downloads from Tribology Letters web site.   Not bad!  So here we are, with academics spending so large effort.

We are back to the conclusion that the real business is the publishers' one.

Mike Ciavarella's picture

Wenbin

 see an example of the reviews I get for the Kassapoglou paper.  They are not to the point, and innovation is needed on this aspect, more than on the aspect you suggest.

 

Commenting on literature models can be of some interest, however criticisms without suggesting a better alternative is not of much help to improve the knowledge of the scientific community.
The Kassapoglou model under scrutiny is proposed to derive the cycles to failure, as a function of R, for composites under fatigue loading. This may be indeed meaningless and not helpful for the (safe) design of composite structures. The final failure of a composite laminate is typically related to the failure of load bearing plies. However, this is only the last catastrophic event of the damage evolution into the material, which begins very early in the fatigue life with the formation of transverse cracks followed by delamination. Damage evolution is associated with a dramatic stiffness loss, which is indeed in most of the cases the reason why the component is not responding anymore to the design requirements and has to be considered “failed”. This scenario is known since the 80s thanks to the pioneering studies of Jamison, Schulte, Reifsnider and Stinchcomb at Virginia Tech, however neither the Kassapoglou model not the comments included in this paper account for this evidence.
In view of the point above, this reviewer sees a very limited value and interest for both the Kassapoglou model itself and the scrutiny discussed in this paper. The extensive discussion on the limits of the statistical analysis of the K model and the reliability of predictions based on static strength values loose significance because the prediction is not considering at all the damage evolution and the associated stiffness loss which may be indeed very different depending on a number of parameters. Just to name a few, one should consider the effects on fatigue response of reinforcing fibers, lay-up, type of loading, load ratio, environment, defects and so on.
After the research program at Virginia Tech,  (see, as a representative example, Jamison, R. D., Schulte, K., Reifsnider, K. L., and Stinchcomb, W. W.,. "Characterization and Analysis of Damage Mechanisms in Tension-Tension Fatigue of Graphite/Epoxy Laminates," Effects of Defects in Composite Materials, ASTM STP. 836, American Society for Testing and Materials, 1984, pp. 21-55.) huge experimental efforts were devoted to understand the mechanics of the fatigue damage evolution. The outcomes are rather clear and conclusive and the literature available on the subject is endless.
Based on this body of knowledge, very recently interesting attempts have been made to develop physics – based design approaches to fatigue oriented to predict the formation of damage and its evolution , see for instance:
Hosoi, Sakuma, Fujita , Kawada, Prediction of initiation of transverse cracks in cross-ply CFRP laminates under fatigue loading by fatigue properties of unidirectional CFRP in 90_direction. Composites: Part A 68 (2015) 398–405
J. Montesano, H. Chu, C.V. Singh , Development of a physics-based multi-scale progressive damage model for assessing the durability of wind turbine blades. Composite Structures 141 (2016) 50–62
J.A. Glud , J.M. Dulieu-Barton , O.T. Thomsen, L.C.T. Overgaard , A stochastic multiaxial fatigue model for off-axis cracking in FRP laminates. International Journal of Fatigue 103 (2017) 576–590
R.D.B. Sevenois , D. Garoz , F.A. Gilabert , S.W.F. Spronk, W. Van Paepegem, Microscale based prediction of matrix crack initiation in UD composite plies subjected to multiaxial fatigue for all stress ratios and load levels. Composites Science and Technology 142 (2017) 124-138
Several methods have been also made available to quantify the stiffness change based on a certain damage state, quantitatively measured by the crack density and delaminated area. Few examples are:
Junqian Zhanga, K. P. Herrmann, Stiffness degradation induced by multilayer intralaminar cracking in composite laminates. Composites: Part A 30 (1999) 683–706
L.N. McCartney, Model to predict effects of triaxial loading on ply cracking in general symmetric laminates. Composites Science and Technology 60 (2000) 2255-2279
P. Lundmark, J. Varna,  Constitutive Relationships for Laminates with Ply Cracks in In-plane Loading. International Journal of damage mechanics, 14 (2005) 235-259
C. V. Singh, R. Talreja , A synergistic damage mechanics approach for composite laminates with matrix cracks in multiple orientations. Mechanics of Materials 41 (2009) 954–968
As a final comment, the physics – based methods are much more reliable and promising than those cited by the authors in refs. [21-23] and this is the approach the community and the industry should follow rather than base the design on phenomenological fittings which are by definition not reliable and most of all not of general validity!

Mike Ciavarella's picture

I am trying to resuscitate a journal with a friend, and he writes me how hard it is just 5 minutes ago.  Obviously I remove all the names.

So this is just an example from real life.

 

Dear Professor Ciavarella, 

 

thank you, I am trying t do my best. You see, when the former Editor was retired the journal was in no single indexing database and looked pretty bad - issue were 1 year late and there was 1 or 2 issues per year, depending on how many papers arrived in the previous year (no paper was rejected). Nobody wanted to take over the journal. I dared to do that and it was starting with 2014. The web-page changed (but we had to use the OJS system, which I do not prefer very much, but this is what the yyyyyyyyyyyy - the publisher, could afford), the Editorial Board, the editorial policies were completely new... In 201? we got the SCOPUS and WOS indexing (starting with 201?), among a number of other, smaller indexing databases, which are simply not important. Now, all those guys who never paid attention to the journal would like to take it over, and to offer publications to their friends. But the people in charge at the KKKKKKKKK how it was and how it is now and they insist I must continue. 

 

The objective remains the SCIe index and the number of citations in 2018 and 2019 will be decisive (Clarivate Analytics will start finalizing the evaluation in August 2019). We look quite good so far with citations in 2016 and 2017, we just need to keep that trend. I am very happy there are some very prolific authors in this issue, particularly you. And, as I have already said 1000 times, whoever supports the journal with citations will always have the open door for publications and the Editorial Board will be reshuffled when the evaluation is finished. Those authors will also be offered to become members of the EB.

 

So, now you know a little bit more about the history and development of XXXXX in the next years. 

 

Best regards,

ZZZZZZZZ

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