ICA has a long tradition in publishing results of ICA-related work. This includes books, journals, proceedings and online resources.
Books
Books have been published with Butterworth Heinemann, Map Collector Publications and Elsevier in the past. Since 2011 ICA is entitled to publish results of their activities, such as commission work, conferences or symposia in a subseries of the Lecture Notes on Geoinformation and Cartography of the Springer-Verlag, called Publications of the International Cartographic Association. Currently nine projects are listed in this series, some of them in progress. In its joined meeting with all commission chairs the current Executive Committee strongly encourages all commissions to consider the opportunity to publish outcome of the work of commissions in this book series. Thus more book projects can be expected in the next years to come.
Journals
In terms of journals ICA is – other than comparable sister societies – not running an own journal so far. In many countries related to ICA journals exist, most of them are often accepting papers in the local language only, while the English speaking journals run by the respective national societies of Canada (Cartographica), USA (Cartography and Geographic Information Science) and the UK (The Cartographic Journal) have gained international presence, and thus are important partners of ICA. Due to the raising importance of the availability of high-quality publication media, as a key indicator for a scientific discipline and the academics working in this discipline, the journals within the domain of Cartography have put some efforts in making themselves aware of this situation. Some journals start to accept English papers, many have adopted a peer-reviewing system to control the quality, usually you can find an international editorial board and some are even trying to get accepted for quality measuring systems, allowing for calculating impact factors, something which needs to be referred to when applying for jobs in academia.
Proceedings
The online availability of all proceedings of International Cartographic Conferences since 1993 has proven to be a most useful source. We aim on continuing this service after the next conferences as well. At this point I would like to mention the two ICA Webmasters who have made quite some efforts to have this service up and running: Manuela Schmidt and Felix Ortag, both from Vienna University of Technology, Austria.
Further publication sources
Finally I would like to mention two more important publication sources.
The biannual newsletter ICA News is edited by Igor Drecki from Auckland University, New Zealand. This publication is strongly committed to ICA-related information, being presented in high-quality in terms of both, content and design. All newsletters can be downloaded for free from the ICA website.
Within the professional magazine GIM International the former Secretary-General David Fairbairn (Newcastle University, UK) is editing and collecting contributions to a one-page ICA column, allowing to address a very prominent number of subscribers with ICA related topics.
At this point I would like to thank both of them, Igor Drecki and David Fairbairn for their efforts.
Publication types at ICC2013
A final word: Related to the upcoming International Cartographic Conference 2013 in Dresden all publication types will be used. A book in the ICA Book Series of selected papers will be published, five special issues of journals will be published (Kartographische Nachrichten, Cartographic Journal, CAGIS, Cartographica, GIM International) and proceedings will be made available via electronic media.
Georg Gartner
President of ICA
