About The Journal of Object Technology

The Journal of Object Technology (JOT)

Quick facts. Online ISSN 1660-1769. First issue May 2002; still publishing. Founded at ETH Zurich, where Bertrand Meyer was based; now published by AITO, the Association Internationale pour les Technologies Objets. Editor-in-chief listed in current reference sources: Alfonso Pierantonio. Model: platinum open access, free to readers and free to authors, under a Creative Commons licence, with continuous publication into an annual dynamic issue. Field: software and language engineering, with roots in object-oriented and component-based development. Abbreviation: J. Object Technol.

Overview

The Journal of Object Technology, universally shortened to JOT, was created to give a research community a journal of its own at a moment when its previous flagship had disappeared. Its subject, object technology, sounds narrow until it is unpacked. Object-oriented programming changed how large software systems are structured: how responsibilities are divided, how components are reused, how languages support abstraction, and how systems evolve without being rewritten. From that starting point JOT broadened, as its own history describes, into software and language engineering as a whole: programming paradigms, modelling, requirements, architecture, verification, maintenance, analytics and development process. The journal today is therefore best understood as a software-engineering journal with a language-and-modelling centre of gravity, not as a journal only about one programming style.

JOT is an online journal. That was a deliberate, early choice. Its first issue appeared in May 2002, when online-only scholarly publishing was still unusual enough to need defending, and the journal paired that choice with an open-access model that charged neither readers nor authors. The journal calls this the platinum model, and notes that it has held to it since its creation in 2002, with contributions under a Creative Commons licence. For readers, the practical result is simple: articles can be read and shared without a subscription and without an author-facing fee barrier of the kind that shapes where many researchers can afford to publish.

Origins: the journal that replaced a journal

From 1986 to 2001, the Journal of Object-Oriented Programming served much of the role of a flagship for this community. After that journal was sold to a new owner in 2000, it was announced in the following year that it would cease publication at the end of 2001. Community leaders judged that a flagship publication was still needed, and JOT was launched in response, with its first issue in May 2002. Its founder was Bertrand Meyer, then at ETH Zurich in Switzerland, a central figure in object-oriented design and in the Eiffel language and method. Richard Wiener, of the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, is listed as founding editor emeritus, a link to the earlier journal's editorial tradition.

The publishing home then changed over time. Early issues state that JOT was published by ETH Zurich, Chair of Software Engineering, and this JournalsWorld record still gives ETH Zurich as publisher, reflecting that founding period. Current journal material states that JOT is published by AITO, the association that also organises the ECOOP conference series, the European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming. Readers meeting both names are not meeting two journals. They are meeting two periods in one journal's life: a university-chair origin at ETH Zurich and a later association publisher, AITO, whose conference community overlaps heavily with the journal's authorship and readership. The ISSN, 1660-1769, is constant across that change.

Scope in detail

The journal welcomes theoretical, empirical, conceptual and experimental results in software and language engineering, and solicits work on software tools and environments as well as technical papers. Its stated topic areas repay individual attention, because together they map a complete view of how software is made.

Programming paradigms. How a language lets a programmer express a solution, object-oriented, functional, concurrent, aspect-oriented or in combination, shapes what can be built and what errors become likely. Work on paradigm design, comparison and formal meaning belongs here.

Software language engineering. Languages are themselves engineered artefacts, including domain-specific languages built for a single field. Papers on language design, implementation, tooling, and the methods by which languages are specified and evolved are a JOT speciality, reflecting the community's roots in language design.

Model-based and model-driven engineering. Models, in this tradition, are not only drawings made before coding. They can generate code, be checked for consistency, be transformed, and evolve alongside the systems they describe. Versioning of models and metamodels, consistency between related models, and transformation methods are recurring themes, and the journal has published extensively in this area.

Requirements engineering. Before architecture or code, someone must establish what a system should do and for whom. Work on eliciting, specifying and analysing requirements, including use-case modelling, on which JOT published special issues in its early years, connects the journal to the earliest and most human stage of development.

Software architecture. The large-scale structure of a system, its components, connectors and design decisions, determines whether it can change gracefully. Architectural description, evaluation and recovery of architecture from existing systems all fit the journal's remit.

Validation and verification. Testing, analysis, type systems and formal methods that increase confidence that software does what it should. The journal's early scope, as reflected in its JournalsWorld subject listing, explicitly included logic, programming and type systems, and that formal strand remains part of its character: a type system is, in effect, a lightweight verification that runs on every compilation.

Maintenance and evolution. Most software effort is spent on systems that already exist. Refactoring, comprehension, migration and the safe evolution of long-lived systems, including the models and languages they depend on, are central practical concerns for this journal's readers.

Software analytics. Data gathered from repositories, executions and development processes can reveal how software is actually built and where it fails. Empirical analysis of that data connects JOT to the evidence-based strand of software engineering.

Development process and methodology. How teams organise design, review, release and improvement. Methodological papers in JOT are expected to be grounded: a process claim should rest on experience, data or a worked application, not on assertion alone.

Editorial leadership and community structure

Current reference listings name Alfonso Pierantonio, of the University of L'Aquila in Italy, as editor-in-chief. Deputy editors-in-chief listed are Mark van den Brand, of Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, and Benoit Combemale, of the University of Rennes in France. Richard Paige, of McMaster University in Canada, is listed as special theme editor, reflecting the journal's use of themed issues and special sections. The steering committee listed includes Bertrand Meyer, Oscar Nierstrasz of the University of Bern, Richard Paige, Antonio Vallecillo of the University of Malaga and Jan Vitek of Northeastern University. That geography, Europe and North America, with a Swiss founding base, is a fair picture of the journal's community.

Alongside peer-reviewed papers, issues have historically contained columns by regular columnists. Names associated with JOT columns include Dave Thomas, Won Kim, Bertrand Meyer and John McGregor. Columns serve a different purpose from research papers: they allow experienced practitioners and researchers to argue a position, explain a practice or provoke a debate quickly, in a voice that a formal paper does not permit. A new reader browsing the archive should distinguish columns from peer-reviewed articles when citing, because they carry different kinds of authority.

Publication model: continuous and platinum open access

JOT uses a continuous publication scheme. Regular papers, on acceptance, are added immediately to a dynamic annual issue, with their final DOI and metadata, rather than waiting for a fixed issue to fill. For authors, that means a citable, final record appears promptly. For readers, it means the current year's issue is a growing collection that should be browsed by article and DOI, not only by issue table of contents in the older sense.

The open-access model deserves emphasis because it defines the journal's economics. JOT describes itself as completely free to both readers and authors, the platinum model, and states that this has been its model since its creation in 2002, with contributions under a Creative Commons licence. There is therefore no subscription barrier for readers and, on the journal's own description, no author charge barrier either. Authors should still read the current submission pages for the licence variant and for any conditions that apply to specific article types, because licence details are set by the journal and can be updated. But the headline position, free to read and free to publish, has been a stated, continuous feature of this journal for more than two decades, well before funder open-access mandates made such models common.

Indexing and discoverability

The journal records indexing in DBLP, the computer-science bibliography that is the first discovery tool for many computing researchers, together with Google Scholar, DOAJ, the Directory of Open Access Journals, the Index of IS Journals and Scopus, with earlier listings also naming Microsoft Academic Search, Scirus and ScientificCommons, services that have since closed or changed. Indexing lists age quickly for exactly that reason: a service named in an older listing may no longer exist, while the durable facts are the ISSN registration, 1660-1769, the DBLP and Scopus presence that computing readers rely on, and the DOAJ presence that signals an open-access journal has been catalogued as such. Authors who need a specific index for assessment purposes should check that index directly, as with any journal.

The JournalsWorld record for JOT reports an h-index of 48 and substantial citation totals from its own data sources. Those are useful directory-level signals of a long, cited archive, more than a thousand works across more than twenty years, but they are not the journal's official metrics and should not be quoted as such. No impact factor is claimed in this profile, because none was verified from an official source for this journal during preparation.

Who should read and submit

JOT fits researchers in software engineering, programming languages and modelling, advanced practitioners who design languages, platforms or modelling tools, and doctoral students who need a venue that values a careful language or modelling contribution as highly as an application study. Its broadening from object technology to software and language engineering means a paper no longer needs an object-oriented framing to belong; it needs a clear contribution to how software or software languages are designed, built, analysed or evolved.

Work will fit best when it is explicit about its kind of contribution. A theoretical paper should state its formal claim and its limits. An empirical paper should describe its data and method well enough to be judged and, where possible, repeated. A conceptual paper should change how a reader thinks about a problem, not only rename it. A tools paper should show a working tool or environment and evidence of its use. The journal's own summary of its assessment priorities, originality, significance, technical soundness and quality of presentation, is a reliable guide to what its reviewers are asked to weigh.

Prospective authors should also consider the archive before submitting. With publication since 2002, JOT has likely published prior work on most topics within its scope, and a submission that engages that prior work, explaining what is new against the journal's own record, signals community membership as well as scholarship. Special theme sections, overseen by the special theme editor, are a regular route for collections arising from workshops and community initiatives; authors organising such a collection should approach the journal through its current editorial contacts rather than assuming an open call covers their theme.

Reading the archive

The archive rewards reading by era. The earliest volumes, from 2002 onward, document a field digesting the end of its previous flagship journal, the rise of model-driven development, and debates about aspects, components and the .NET and Java platforms as they then stood. Middle volumes show modelling, language engineering and empirical work gaining weight. Recent volumes, under continuous publication, are best approached by topic and author rather than by issue. Throughout, the DOI is the stable citation element: JOT articles carry DOIs in the 10.5381/jot form visible across its published record, and citing the DOI avoids the link decay that has affected many early online-only journals' original web addresses, including the historic jot.fm addresses printed on early PDFs.

Assessment

JOT's distinction is institutional as much as topical. It was founded to preserve a community's scholarly conversation when its previous journal closed, it adopted free-to-read and free-to-publish open access at its creation in 2002 and kept that model, and it moved from a university chair publisher at ETH Zurich to the community's own association, AITO, without changing its ISSN or its remit beyond the broadening its field itself underwent. For an author, the practical proposition is a long-running, Scopus- and DBLP-indexed, open-access venue in software and language engineering with no author charge on its own description. For a reader, it is a free archive of more than twenty years of work on how software languages and systems are designed and evolved. Editorial names, licence details and submission mechanics should always be confirmed on the journal's current site, because those are the details any journal updates most often.

Special issues, workshops and the conference connection

JOT has always lived close to its community's workshops and conferences, and its archive reflects that closeness. Early volumes carried special issues arising from workshop series attached to major conferences: for example, a special issue from the SPLAT workshop series on software-engineering properties of languages and aspect technologies, a special issue from the OOPS track of the ACM Symposium on Applied Computing on object-oriented programming languages and systems, a .NET-focused special issue from an ECOOP workshop, and a use-case modelling special issue linked to the UML conference. Those collections matter beyond their individual papers. They show how the journal served as the archival home for conversations that began as one-day workshops: the workshop tested an idea quickly, and the journal issue gave the strongest contributions a permanent, citable and expanded form.

That pipeline still describes a practical route into the journal. Research groups that run a workshop or a themed track in model-driven engineering, language design or software evolution have historically been able to develop its best work into a themed journal collection, coordinated through the journal's special theme editorship. Organisers should expect the journal's normal peer review to apply to such collections; a workshop acceptance is a starting point for a journal submission, not a substitute for review. Readers, in turn, can use the special-issue record as a map of what this community thought was urgent at a given date, because a special issue is, by definition, a topic a group of specialists persuaded an editor deserved concentrated attention.

What a strong JOT submission looks like

Because the journal spans theory and practice, strength looks different across its article types, and authors help their own case by making the type of contribution unmistakable in the opening pages. A language-design paper is strong when it gives the language a precise definition, shows a program that could not be written as clearly before, and discusses what the new mechanism costs in complexity or in interaction with existing features. A modelling paper is strong when its models do work, generating, checking or transforming something, rather than only picturing a system informally. An empirical paper is strong when its research questions, its data sources and its threats to validity are stated plainly enough that another group could repeat or challenge the study. A tool paper is strong when the tool exists, is described at the level a builder needs, and is supported by evidence from use beyond its own developers.

Presentation carries unusual weight in this journal, for a reason rooted in its history. JOT was founded by figures known for insisting that programming is a design discipline with an aesthetic and intellectual standard, and its readership includes many researchers who write and review in that spirit. A paper that is technically sound but carelessly organised will meet a harder reception here than its content alone might predict. Clear section structure, honest related-work discussion that includes the journal's own earlier contributions, and examples chosen to illuminate rather than to impress are the practical marks of a submission prepared for this specific journal rather than for software engineering in general.

A note on names and citations. The journal is cited both as The Journal of Object Technology and, without the opening article, as Journal of Object Technology; databases vary in which form they display, and the abbreviation JOT is used by the journal itself. The stable elements in any citation search are the ISSN, 1660-1769, the article DOI and the author name. Because publication is continuous, the year and the article's DOI identify a paper more reliably than an issue number alone. A reader who finds an older PDF carrying an ETH Zurich imprint and a newer article carrying the AITO imprint is looking at the same journal at different points in its publishing history, and a reference list may legitimately contain both imprints for different publication years.

Sources consulted for this profile are listed in the accompanying sources file. Facts that could not be verified from official or listing sources were left out rather than assumed.