Dear Authors and Readers!
This issue is the last one in the fifth volume of “Modern Stochastics: Theory and Applications” (MSTA). It is a good point to look how MSTA has grown and improved, how it became attractive for field professionals.
The publisher of the journal – VTeX company (Vilnius, Lithuania, www.vtex.lt) – works in the field of the scientific publishing since 1991, providing publishing solutions and services to many science publishers: big commercial ones, and also to society and university publishers. The company was established by seven professional mathematicians from Lithuania and Netherlands. We still have very close connection with the academic community, and we are always “scientist-minded”.
When two renowned scientists, Prof. Yuliya Mishura from Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, Ukraine and Prof. Kęstutis Kubilius from Vilnius University, Lithuania, applied to us with the idea to establish a new modern journal in the field of stochastics, we did not hesitate to make our best to fulfill that idea. We highly appreciate the goodwill of both universities to become co-publishers of the journal, and their support which was very important at the journal creation stage.
The Editors-in-Chief take the burden of keeping the high scientific level of the journal, while our company is in charge of all technical details: starting from the submission and peer-review process up to the hosting and dissemination of the journal.
From its beginning the journal uses the online peer-review system Electronic Journal Management System (vtex.lt/services), created by our IT specialists. This system speeds up the reviewing processes and helps the Editorial Board to work in the most efficient way. It is integrated with the CrossRef Similarity Check powered by iThenticate to keep the ethical standards established by the Committee on Publication Ethics.
After an article is accepted by the Editorial Board, we process and enrich authors’ files to put them in a modern format that ensures a perfect typographical view of published articles and enables for them machine readability and online searchability.
The strong side of the article processing workflow is our online LaTeX-based proofing system SkyLaTeX (vtex.lt/services). It allows authors to insert their corrections directly into the articles’ production LaTeX files instead of annotating corrections on PDF. This way of handling corrections enables authors to achieve the final formatting as close to their desire as possible. The benefits of SkyLaTeX are appreciated by more than 40 thousand scientists that already used this system.
In March 2018, the journal was launched on our new hosting platform – PubliMill. It was a huge technological leap. The most clear benefits of PubliMill are an impeccable appearance of full-text articles, increased discoverability, and a mobile-friendly layout. On PubliMill, the number of MSTA visitors has increased more than twice.
Furthermore, MSTA is starting to use a new indexing tool called AKIS. This tool uses artificial intelligence to extract from the text most essential subjects showing what the current article or issue is about. In this issue, along with traditional indices we included the cumulative five-years subject index generated by AKIS with the supervision and manual adjustment by the Editors-in-Chief. AKIS was also used to create the tag cloud of the five-years content of MSTA journal (Fig. 1).
Our joint efforts with Editors-in-Chief, the whole Editorial Board to keep high scientific and technological standards resulted in the worldwide recognition of MSTA journal. Already in the first two years of the journal’s life, it was included in two major mathematical databases – MathSciNet and zbMATH. Recently MSTA was also included in the Web of Science (Emerging Sources Citation Index) database and is advised to be included in Scopus. Other indexing services also have MSTA in their databases. This indicates that the journal is recognized by the broader audience of scientists. As one of the Scopus reviewers puts it: “This is an excellent journal in theoretical probability. Unusually for a new journal, those who work in this area will want to browse new issues regularly.”
We are proud that the synergy of the scientific strength of the academic community around the journal and the high-tech solutions accumulated in VTeX company has moved “Modern Stochastics: Theory and Applications” to such a high level. In the upcoming years we will continue to work improving MSTA journal and hope to see it being recognized by more professionals in the field.
We would welcome any suggestion, advise, idea from all scientists – authors, collaborators, readers – how our journal could serve you better. Please, do not hesitate to contact us with your comments by mail (ejournals-vmsta@vtex.lt) and follow us on Twitter (@MSTA_VTeX).
Let’s make together our journal better!
