Quantum Information Theory, Computing, Algorithms, Networking, Engineering and Education Journals

(Edited on 20/2/29 and 20/5/19, as noted in line.)

The field of quantum computing, broadly constituted, is changing rapidly. Hundreds, nay thousands, of new people are entering the field each year right now. Eventually, things will settle out, but in the short run what is publishable research and how we publish it are going to undergo a lot of stress.  And eventually publishing will become less critical for a large number of quantum computing graduates, as they will move into the nascent quantum industry, where different metrics of success will be applied and ideas will affect society in different ways. But for now, the primary mode of work is research-oriented people creating and testing new ideas, and the standard approach to disseminating those ideas is peer-reviewed publications.

One of the problems is that architecture and engineering are neither theory nor experiment. Each is its own beast. Where do we send papers describing advances in software tools, architectural principles and evaluation, network protocols, etc.? Many of the existing journals are not good venues for this engineering-oriented work, but neither are most of the ACM and IEEE top journals and conferences.

Another item high on my list is how to value creation of new educational tools and techniques, e.g., our MOOC.

But before fussing too much, it's worth taking a look at what we currently have for publication venues...

Very roughly in terms of age, but grouped by organization (in short, the order in which my brain chose to produce/organize them of its own accord):

1. Nature and Science: You know the drill. Top experimental papers only. 20 papers/year each.
2. Physical Review Letters. Top papers, including theory and algorithms; HHL, for example. Highly compressed; I refer to a PRL as "the cryptographic hash of a longer paper still to come".
3. Physical Review A. Has been an excellent venue for almost anything quantum (my first quantum arithmetic paper, for example, and recent engineering-oriented work on quantum networks), and has explicitly added to its charter since the founding of APS's Division of Quantum Information, but is overwhelmed; acceptance rate is declining and topics are narrowing.
4. Physical Review X. Cody's architecture paper was explicitly described by the editors as, "Hey, this isn't really physics in the traditional sense, but we think it's cool." (Well, that's a liberal paraphrase.) (At almost 250 citations, according to Scholar, good call on their part if they value citations to their journal.)
5. IOP New Journal of Physics. An excellent venue, longer papers than PRL but good visibility. But seems to draw from same reviewer and reader pool as PRA.
6. IOP Quantum Science and Technology. Looks to be an excellent new venue, and quantum-focused, which is a win, and we're happy with it, but seems to draw from same reviewer and reader pool as PRA, at least so far. Hopefully engineering-oriented papers will continue to find a home here.
7. Quantum Information and Computation (QIC). Has been the journal of record for much quantum algorithms work, less so for experimental work and engineering. Subscriptions are expensive, but papers can be put on the arXiv.
8. Quantum Information Processing (QIP). Along with QIC, a top journal, with more experimental work. Also expensive, also arXiv-friendly.
9. International Journal of Quantum Information (IJQI). Gets less attention than QIC and QIP. Also arXiv-friendly.
10. ACM Journal of Emerging Technology in Computing Systems (JETC). One of my favorite journals. I spent two years as an associate editor, and wouldn't mind doing another stint here. arXiv-friendly. Not quantum only, but definitely has a good quantum component. Will be interesting to see if that changes with the introduction of...
11. ACM Transactions on Quantum Computing (TQC). If the quality of a review board is an indicator of the quality of a journal, destined to be the top thing in our field. True rock stars, and great breadth. Will probably be limited to a few dozen high-impact papers a year?
12. Nature Quantum Information (npj QI). Aims to be a top journal. Open access, which is great, but the author fees are outrageous. I won't pay them.
13. Nature Communications and Scientific Reports. In my limited experience, erratic in review quality and editorial procedures, and no help on formatting and copy editing, but still have the outrageous Nature open access fees. A worse deal all the way around than npj QI.
14. Science Advances. I haven't interacted with this yet at all. Also has high open access fees.
15. Quantum. The new star in our firmament. An overlay journal dependent on the arXiv. Outstanding, young editorial board, this is the cool coffee shop where all the hipsters hang out. Go here to be seen and to hear the newest tunes!
16. IEEE Transactions on Quantum Engineering. I have heard only rumors of this and either my Google-fu is poor, or there's nothing about it on the web. Could be good, but unless it's an exception to the truly egregious average IEEE journal latency, not useful for students. (Edit on 20/2/29: Link added. Erik DeBenedictis is EiC, the journal will be good! First papers published in early 2020.)
17. IET Quantum Communication is brand new, and has a lot of "wireless" in its call, since that's the community the founders come from.
18. PRX Quantum will start publishing in mid-2020 (Edit: this one added 20/2/29.)
19. Wiley Quantum Engineering (Edit: this one added 20/2/29.)
20. Springer Quantum Machine Intelligence (Edit: this one added 20/5/19.)

Of course, there are conferences and workshops, too.

And I'm working on a short slide deck on how contributions to open source and non-traditional publishing (e.g. my #QuantumComputerArchitecture tweetstorm) should count.

But for the moment, the above nineteen or so journals are where the primary action is.