Authors Guide

The ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applications (TOMM - formerly known as TOMCCAP) is an ACM multidisciplinary, archival, scholarly journal in the general field of multimedia and applications, which started operating in January 2004. It is the prime ACM journal in the field. Multimedia is now a mature area, having evolved over approximately 20 years. The term “media” traditionally referred to entities such as audio, video, text, images, graphics, animation. New media has been added nowadays, including virtual reality, holography, haptics, eSmell, eTaste, eThought, …. The term “multimedia” has now been accepted to mean documents composed of at least two correlated media. The correlation could be temporal, spatial or semantic. Applications appear in many fields such as entertainment, publishing, advertising, banking, insurance, e-commerce, travel, medical, defense, training, geographical information systems, weather and many others.
 

TOMMM is soliciting paper submissions on all aspects of multimedia, as defined above. Please have a look at the extensive list of topics below. Papers on single media (audio, video, animation, haptics,..), their processing, networking  and applications are also welcome. However, papers covering a single algorithm or aspect of one specific kind of media only (like e.g. image compression algorithms) are likely to be rejected.

Of special interest are papers on the following three major challenges: (i) new authoring tools that make authoring complex multimedia as easy as using a word processor or a drawing program, (ii) applications that make interactions with remote people and environments nearly the same as interactions with local people and environments and (iii) multimedia systems that make capturing, storing, finding, and using digital media an everyday occurrence in our computing environment. Papers on new integrated media, including virtual reality, haptics, holography, eSmell, eTaste, eThought are also highly encouraged.

The transactions consists primarily of research papers. This is an archival journal and it is intended that the papers will have lasting importance and value over time. In general, papers whose primary focus is on particular multimedia products will not be included.

General Guidelines

Submissions should contain original material that has not been previously published in a journal, nor is currently under review by another journal. If material in the submission was previously published in a conference paper, the new submission must technically extend the conference paper by at least 25% new material, the submission should clearly cite the prior conference paper, and the authors must upload a letter explaining what has been extended in the new submission. Self-plagiarism is handled similar to all kinds of plagiarism by directly rejecting the article. This encompasses verbatim copying of text passages without marking them as a quote as well as copying of ideas without mentioning the original ressource in the respective text passage. If your paper is a re-submission of a previously rejected submission to TOMM please add a letter-of-changes adressing all comments by the reviewers from the previous submission.

Authors should be aware of the ACM Authors Representations

TOMCCAP features two different types of submissions:
  1. Technical contributions: Those submissions include technical contributions developed and evaluated by the author(s) themself. In case of extensions of previously published conference papers the added contributions have to be of technical nature, such as new methods, significant technical improvements, new approaches, new features, etc. Simply more explanations and/or more performance evaluations or experiments compared to the proceedings version are NOT considered technical extension! Please use the article type "Regular Paper" in the submission system.
  2. Survey papers: Giving a comprehensive overview on current and past research on specific aspects of multimedia. Please use the article type "Survey Paper" in the submission system.

Submission Process and Article Layout

All material should be submitted online, using the ACM Manuscript Central System. The submission page limit is 23 pages using the small ACM Submission Format (Word template / Latex template). The 23 pages includes text, figures and references. Note, the additional pages needed for responding to reviewers on re-submission are not counted towards the 23 page limit. In addition to the 23 pages, all papers may have an appendix of 5 pages using the same template. The appendix will be published online, via the ACM Digital Library only. Your online appendix has to be headlined with "Online Appendix". Please find an explanation in the template files. Further, please put the paper itself and the online appendix in one single PDF file. For survey papers, a page length of 28 pages (plus optional online-only appendix) is allowed.
Please note that formatting assistance is provided at no charge to authors by Aptara, as specified on the author style guide pages: http://www.acm.org/publications/article-templates/acm-latex-style-guide and http://www.acm.org/publications/article-templates/word-style-guide.

Authors have to be aware of the ACM rules regarding third-party content. Please notice also the information on Fair Use.

Authors are highly encouraged to submit additional multimedia files together with their articles (such as videos, audio files or images) that show the outcome of their work. For accepted articles, these multimedia files can be published in the ACM Digital Library together with the paper itself. If you decide to make use of this option, please upload the files as "Supplemental files" and add a "readme.txt" explaining what these files show.

Review results are normally returned within three months of submission. After submitting a manuscript, authors should direct their questions about the review process to the editor-in-chief (see contact page).

ACM Computing Classification System (CSS)

An important aspect of preparing your paper for publication by ACM Press is to provide the proper indexing and retrieval information from the ACM Computing Classification System (CCS). This is beneficial to you because accurate categorization provides the reader with quick content reference, facilitating the search for related literature, as well as searches for your work in ACM's Digital Library and on other online resources.

Please read the HOW TO CLASSIFY WORKS USING ACM'S COMPUTING CLASSIFICATION SYSTEM for instructions on how to classify your document using the 2012 ACM Computing Classification System and insert the index terms into your LaTeX or Microsoft Word source file.

Language Service

ACM has partnered with American Journal Experts (AJE) to provide language editing (and translation) services to ACM authors. AJE has helped thousands of researchers around the world to present their research in polished English suitable for publication in journals such as those published by ACM. Editing is available for both Word and LaTeX files.

To take advantage of this partnership, visit http://www.aje.com/c/acm15. When using this link, you will get a 15% discount for all AJE services. (Editing services are at author expense and do not guarantee publication of a paper.)

Topics

The journal accepts publications in the three general subfields of multimedia computing, communications, and applications, each consisting of various areas of research. Note that this is not an exclusive list: other topics in these fields (computing, communications, applications) are also accepted.

  • Multimedia computing (research on systems support)
    • Multimedia data abstractions
    • Media coding, adaption and processing
    • Multimodal human-centered computing
    • Media content security and rights management
    • Mobile multimedia
    • Multimedia Quality of Experience
  • Multimedia communications (research on computer networks support)
    • Real-time protocols
    • Resource-adaptive systems
    • Multicast and group communication
    • Wireless multimedia
    • Multimedia streaming (via P2P etc.)
    • Cloud-based multimedia
  • Multimedia applications (research on tools and applications)
    • Distributed collaboration, including video conferencing
    • Immersive environments, telepresence and 3D worlds
    • Conten authoring, search, retrieval and recommender systems
    • Multimedia-based teaching and learning
    • Multimedia content analysis
    • Multimodal affective computing
    • New integrated media (virtual reality, haptics, holography, eSmell, eTaste etc.)
    • Social media
    • Metrics and methods to evaluate Quality of Experience
    • multimodal affective computing