ICA Annual Board Meeting Highlights
The ICA Board of Directors held its annual meeting during the London conference. It has been a very busy year for ICA, the board, and the various committees.
The Publications Committee has become a crucial committee that monitors all aspects of the ICA publication program. The board approved three recommendations from the committee. ICA will initiate the use of iThenticate and have all articles submitted to ICA checked for possible plagiarism issues on submission. Other approved changes are that editors of ICA journals will develop an associate editor model, and that ICA members will be encouraged to volunteer to review ICA journal submissions by contacting the journal editors. Lastly, the board approved extending editor’s terms from 3 years to 4. Two new editors will begin their transition this fall: Rhadika Parameswaran will begin editing CCC and Shyam Sundar will edit JCMC. Relatedly, the board approved a recommendation by the task force on alternate forms of publication to work with Wiley on make all journal publications online-only by 2017.
The board has had discussions over the past couple of meetings on how to address membership issues for those who are no longer graduate students and not yet full time faculty members. There were several possible labels for this category, but the board settled on a temporary category of “membership exception”. This category would pay 75% of full membership and conference fees. Such a change requires a bylaws change and this will be submitted to the ICA membership in the election in September 2013.
The board also continued its examination of the ICA Fellows election process and the diversity, or lack thereof, as well as the low number of Fellows elected each year. Working in concert with the Fellows, a bylaws change will be submitted to the ICA membership in September that will alter how abstentions are counted in the election of Fellows. As well, all divisions and interest groups are encouraged to submit nominations to better reflect the highest quality scholarship across sections and regions.
Committees during the coming year will continue or develop efforts regarding (a) internationalization, including mentorship on publishing in English, (b) consideration of gender equity issues, (c) publication issues, (d) intellectual property, (e) gender equity, and (f) research repositories.
The board also approved becoming a signatory on the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (http://am.ascb.org/dora/).
ICA is cosponsoring upcoming regional conferences in Shanghai, Brasilia, and possibly Poland. Please check the ICA website for details.
Lastly, the board approved the upcoming conference rotation:
The Midyear Board meeting will be held 17-19 January 2014 in Washington, DC.