APPENDIX 4

ISPRS Publication Policy

 
Version June 2024

1. Introduction

The official ISPRS publications are:

• The International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences contain the abstract-reviewed proceedings of all ISPRS Congresses, Symposia and selected Workshops.
• The ISPRS Annals of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences contain selected full-paper double-blind reviewed scientific contributions of ISPRS Congresses, Symposia and selected Workshops.
• The ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing is the official peer-reviewed publication of the Society on photogrammetry and remote sensing. It is published twelve times per year and contains scientific and technical articles and reviews.
• The ISPRS Open Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensingis the official open access publication of the Society on photogrammetry, remote sensing, computer vision and related fields. It is the sister journal of the ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, and contains scientific and technical articles and reviews as well as application-oriented reports, and is published online by Elsevier with currently four volumes per year.
• The ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information, an international scientific open access journal on geo-information, is the official peer-reviewed publication of the Society on geo-information. It is published online every three months.
• The ISPRS eBulletin is the official bulletin of the Society, distributed electronically about every two months. It contains Society news, membership information, reports from ISPRS activities as well as book and project reviews .
• The ISPRS Book Series includes high quality refereed papers from ISPRS Congresses, Symposia or Workshops, to provide information to a wider international audience.

In addition, ISPRS publishes:

• The ISPRS Homepage www.isprs.org contains current information about the society and its activities, incl. the quadrennial ISPRS organisation with listings of all Commissions and WGs, Terms of Reference (ToR) and officer addresses; ToR of ISPRS Awards; Statutes and Bylaws; and other ISPRS background information.
• The continuously updated ISPRS Member List, published online to provide Members, officers and interested groups with current addresses of Members.

The remainder of this appendix is only concerned with the Archives and Annals.

2. General Guidelines for Archives and Annals

The International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences and the ISPRS Annals of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences are the official records of the the Congress, the ISPRS Geospatial Week, the ISPRS mid-term Symposia as well as other ISPRS events.

For the Congress, the Geospatial Week and for each Technical Commission Symposia, both Archives and Annals are published; for other ISPRS events, normally either Archives or Annals are published. Exceptions from this general rule require prior approval by Council.

Both the Archives and the Annals represent the state-of-the-art of the work carried out by ISPRS researchers in the photogrammetry, remote sensing and spatial information sciences. All Congress and Geospatial Week Directors, Technical Commission Presidents, Working Group officers and Convenors of other ISPRS events who produce publications should regard themselves as representatives of ISPRS and are responsible for the scientific and technical quality of the published proceedings. The publication of the proceedings shall be according to the contractual arrangements made with Copernicus GmbH.

The Archives and the Annals are generated from ISPRS events. All contributions submitted to an ISPRS event are published online and under the Creative Commons licence. Specifications for preparation are given in the ISPRS Guidelines for Authors (see appendix 5); organisers of ISPRS events are responsible that all papers follow these guidelines. All Archives and Annals must be coordinated in advance with the Secretary General and must use:

• a readable format with appropriate software for reading and searching
• the appropriate ISSN for Archives or Annals (see web for details)
• the official ISPRS logo
• the approved volume and part number
• the French and German translation of the title: Archives Internationales des Sciences de la Photogrammétrie, de la Télédétection et de l'Information Spatiale, and Internationales Archiv für Photogrammetrie, Fernerkundung und Raumbezogene Informationswissenschaften or
• Annales Internationales des Sciences de la Photogrammétrie, de la Télédétection et de l'Information Spatiale, and Internationale Annalen für Photogrammetrie, Fernerkundung und Raumbezogene Informationswissenschaften
• the ISPRS Guidelines for Authors
• an author index.

Adherence to these specifications is mandatory for ISPRS event publications to be included in the Archives or Annals.

Publications not adhering to these specifications shall stand in their own right as "Related ISPRS publications" but shall not be part of the official Archives or Annals.

Archives and Annals volume and part numbering must be approved and coordinated with Copernicus GmbH in advance. Unless otherwise approved:

• Volume numbers shall be progressively in Roman numerals, with odd numerals reserved for Congress volumes and even numerals for all other Archives and Annals.
• Part number for Congress volumes shall be Part A for the Congress Proceedings volume, and Part B for the Congress paper volumes, followed by the Arabic number of the relevant Commission (followed by lower case a, b, etc. for multiple volumes of the Commission), followed by a hyphen and the year of the Congress.
• Part number for the Commission Symposia volumes shall be the Arabic number of the Commission, followed by a hyphen and the year of the Symposium.
• Part number for the Geospatial Week shall be G for Geospatial Week, followed by a hyphen and the year of the Geospatial Week.
• Part number for other ISPRS events shall be the Arabic number of the primary sponsoring Commission followed by W for Workshops, and an Arabic sequence number.

Upon approval of the ISPRS Secretary General, ISPRS Ordinary Members and ISPRS Committees can publish the proceedings of their annual meetings in the ISPRS proceedings series, provided they adhere to the publication guidelines. In such a case, in the numbering scheme the letter M for Member is used instead of W for Workshop. Also, institutional ISPRS Members have the possibility to have the proceedings of their meetings published in the Archives (not the Annals), provided that they fulfil the related requirements with respect to reviewing, layout etc. For details the Secretary General should be contacted.

As examples, Vol. XLIX-B1-2026 contains the proceedings of Technical Commission I for the 2026 Congress in Toronto, Canada, Vol. XLVIII-G-2025 contains the proceedings of the Geospatial Week 2025 in Dubai, Vol. XLVIII-4-2024 contains the proceedings of the Midterm Symposium of Technical Commission IV held in 2024, Vol. XLVIII-4/W9-2024 contains the proceedings of the ninth workshop held during the period 2022-2026 sponsored by Technical Commission IV (the 2024 Geoadvances meeting in Istanbul), and Vol. XLVIII-M-3-2023 contains the proceedings of a member of ISPRS (the proceedings of the 2023 ASPRS Annual Conference).

ISPRS must be prominently mentioned in any promotional material that refers to publications containing papers of ISPRS events and ISPRS co-sponsored events.

Advertisements may be published in the Archives or Annals provided that they are contained only within the end pages.

Proceedings of ISPRS co-sponsored events do not appear in either Archives or Annals. assigned by Copernicus GmbH.
 

3. Review Procedure

To ensure the highest quality of papers is published in the Archives and Annals, the review to be followed by the ISPRS event organisers is as follows.

A programme committee for the event is established by the event organiser and the names are publicly announced. Members of the programme committee should be scientific leaders in the field with ample expertise regarding the topics of the meeting. The event organiser usually acts as chair of the programme committee and also serves as editor of the respective Archives or Annals volume.

Following submission, abstracts (for Archives) and full papers (for Annals), respectively, are assessed by a minimum of two programme committee members against a set of pre-defined criteria. These criteria include scientific originality, potential interest in the community, proper documentation of prior work, clarity of presentation, technical correctness and correct use of language. Details are given in the web interface for the review process of the event. This list may be prolonged by items specific to a certain event such as relevance for professional users or relevance in an interdisciplinary setting, if the event includes such goals.

For all submission the automatic plagiarism check offered by Copernicus GmbH is to be used. Papers submitted to the Annals are to be checked prior to the full-paper review. In case of an Archive submission, the final camera-ready paper is checked. The results of the check are made available to the programme committee chair. In case of suspicion of plagiarism, the author(s) is/are to be contacted for an explanation. If the doubts persist, the programme committee and the ISPRS Secretary General are to be notified, who will take a final decision about the paper.

For both the Archives and Annals, it is to be ensured that conflicts of interest during the review process are avoided. Any person involved in paper reviewing must declare a conflict of interest if they recognise a paper as the work of a direct colleague, collaborator, or if for other reasons they have doubts about their objectivity.
People in an active supervisor-student relation and colleagues working in the same research team as any of the authors of a paper are always considered as having a conflict of interest. In case of a conflict, a new reviewer is assigned by the programme committee chair.

In cases where the programme committee chair has a conflict of interest, the corresponding papers are not reviewed under the responsibility of the programme committee chair, but are completely handled by an auxiliary programme coordinator. The auxiliary coordinator shall be an experienced researcher (e.g. a senior member of the programme committee), nominated prior to the beginning of the review process. Decisions of the auxiliary coordinator are final.

The views of the programme committee are assembled by the committee chair. In case of disagreement, additional reviews are solicited, until a final decision is reached. Results (acceptance or rejection) are then established for each paper. For ISPRS events with both Archives and Annals, papers rejected for publication in the Annals may be considered for inclusion in the Archives.

Except for those papers, in which the programme committee chair has a conflict of interest, the final responsibility for the results rests with the programme committee chair. The scientific programme of the event is established based on the results of the review process. The review results are then communicated to the authors, who prepare the final paper.

4. ISPRS policy on pre-prints in public repositories

ISPRS recognizes the increase in popularity of publishing technical reports in public, non-commercial repositories such as arXiv. As a result, a paper submitted to an ISPRS Journal or an ISPRS scientific meeting may already be available to the community, and during the review process the authors of a paper may be known to the reviewer. As decided during the ISPRS Council Meeting on March 19, 2017, papers posted in arXiv and similar repositories, including the home page of the authors, are not considered prior work. As a consequence, authors are not required to declare whether or not they have posted a paper in such repositories, however, they can declare a posting if they wish to do so.

A reviewer should review such a paper as if the paper in the repository did not exist. Citations to papers in the repository are not required and failing to cite them or beat the performance of algorithms etc. described therein are not grounds for rejection. Reviewers should make every effort to treat papers fairly whether or not they know (or suspect) who wrote them, while at the same time not giving away their own identity.

Further details on the ISPRS pre-print policy can be found at   https://www.isprs.org/documents/guidelines/pre-publication.aspx.