Welcome to the International Cartographic Association
Welcome to the website of the International Cartographic AssociationGet to know the new ICA Executive Committee for the term 2023-2027Get to know the ICA Commissions for the term 2023-2027
Welcome to the website of the International Cartographic Association
Get to know the new ICA Executive Committee for the term 2023-2027
Get to know the ICA Commissions for the term 2023-2027

ICA Publications and Publication Policy — first Publication Volume is online

In 2017 the EC introduced a new publication policy, which focuses on the conference proceedings. In order to give them an adequate visibility and reputation, a conference publication series has been established, which is adminstrated and hosted by a professional publisher. There are three publication options, depending on the review and the extent of the papers: ICA Advances, ICA Proceedings and ICA Abstracts.

The benefits will be manyfold:

  • Visibility: one single point of contact for the publications of ICA events
  • Reliability: the publications will be available at the time of the conference
  • Open Access: the publications are published online and under the Creative Commons licence
  • Reputation: the publisher will suggest the ICA Advances and Proceedings for inclusion in several data bases and indices (e.g. Scopus, Web of Science)
  • Standardization: one standardized format of the publications

This new policy will not interfere with publications in ICA related journals; in contrast, it will provide an excellent basis for developing high-level journal publications.

New ICA conference and events publications

Starting in 2017, the ICA records the outcomes of their Conferences like ICC, RCC as well as all other ICA events in three official publication outlets, which are hosted by a commercial publisher, Copernicus GmbH:

  1. Advances in Cartography and GIScience of the International Cartographic Association (short: Advances of the ICA, eISSN 2570-2084): single-blind peer review based on a full paper – termed Advances in the following;
  2. Proceedings of the International Cartographic Association (short: Proceedings of the ICA, eISSN 2570-2092): single-blind peer review based on submitted abstracts, developed to full paper – termed Proceedings in the following;
  3. Abstracts of the International Cartographic Association (short: Abstracts of the ICA, eISSN 2570-2106): single-blind peer review based on submitted abstracts; publication of abstract only – termed Abstracts in the following.

With these three series, the ICA can offer excellent opportunities for their authors to present their work – full papers for more research-oriented work, abstract based full papers for advanced work-in-progress, as well as abstracts for practically oriented work or artwork, which typically are not adequately represented in a full paper.

For the ICC and for the RCC, Advances and Proceedings are published; for other ICA events, either Advances or Proceedings are published. Exceptions from this general rule require prior approval by EC. All event formats have the option to also publish the Abstracts.

These publications are generated from all ICA events. Organisers will be required to provide Copernicus with camera-ready manuscripts in pdf format, together with the respective metadata, four to six weeks prior to the scheduled meeting, depending on the size of the event. For each published paper a moderate APC (article processing charge) has to be paid (as of January 1st it is €17,50). This sum should be included in the event fees.

Role of International Journal of Cartography (IJC)

In order to promote the International Journal of Cartography (IJC), there is a special option for the International Cartographic Conferences (ICCs): the IJC can select 8–12 papers from the full paper peer-review track for a special issue published at the event.

In addition to the regulations above, all event organizers are expected to seek high quality papers at the conferences and meetings to be published in the Journal of Cartography. Furthermore, they do always have the option to approach the IJC for a special issue.

Main changes in a nutshell …

  • one visible location (at Copernicus) and structure for publication of all ICA events
  • no longer the need for event organizers to organize their own publications because all go into one of our series
  • no longer Springer books from our bi-annual International Cartographic Conferences (ICCs)
  • Springer ICA books will be available for special events (old agreements will be honoured)
  • conference papers may be extended and handed in for a journal publication after the event

First proceedings volume

Journal Website Proceedings of the ICA

The first papers published in the new series are the papers from the ICC in Washington, which appear in the “Proceedings of the International Cartographic Association“ as Volume 1. They are accessible via www.proc-int-cartogr-assoc.net

 

Monika Sester
– Chair of the ICA Publication Committee

Category: General News

President’s Blog: Publications

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

Three older ICC proceedings digitized and available online

We are happy to announce that we digitized three older ICC proceedings and made them available on our publications page. We now have all the proceedings online since 1993. The new ones are:

We would like to thank the Swedish Cartographic Society, the Institut Cartogràfic de Catalunya and the German Society of Cartography for allowing this use and Sigita Grīnfelde for the indexing work.

We are interested to hear in the comments below if these proceedings are of any help for you.

Category: General News

Proceedings of the ICC 2011 in Paris are online

The last International Cartographic Conference took place in Paris, France from 3rd to 8th of July 2011. The proceedings of this event are now available online via the publications section!

The ICC also hosted the 15th General Assembly of the ICA. The relevant changes to the ICA structure, especially the new Executive Committee of the ICA, will be reflected on the ICA website in the upcoming weeks.

Category: General News
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