Acta Acustica

Acta Acustica’s topical issue on auditory models follows open science principles

Details: Published on 11 May 2022

Acta Acustica announces the publication of the first articles in a new topical issue titled Auditory models: from binaural processing to multimodal cognition. The topical issue edited by P. Majdak, R. Baumgartner and M. Lavandier presents a collection of recent advances in research on conceptual and computational auditory models with a particular focus on spatial hearing. The first eight articles are now available, including the keynote article “AMT 1.x: A toolbox for reproducible research in auditory modeling” by Piotr Majdak, Clara Hollomey and Robert Baumgartner. The full topical issue will contain about 15 articles.

When a new model is published in the traditional form of a journal article, the model description and the discussion about its properties are often not sufficient to reproduce the results. In contrast, articles published in the Auditory Models topical issue of Acta Acustica follow open science principles to enable future research in auditory modeling. The models described in this topical issue are all deposited in the Auditory Modeling Toolbox (AMT) repository under a free software license. The AMT 1.0.0 version includes over 50 models as well as auditory data required to run the models, and is freely available as an open-source package. All articles published in the special issue feature a data availability statement, as well as data and software citations in a standardized format. These elements provide clear information to the reader on where and under what conditions the data and code supporting the publication can be accessed.

Auditory models have applications in a wide range of domains. In particular they can facilitate advances in technical applications, such as the improvement of human-machine communication, as well as in clinical applications, such as the development of new processing strategies in hearing-assistive devices.

Since its relaunch as a fully open access journal in 2020, Acta Acustica aims to follow open science principles, as outlined in this 2021 Editorial: “From Open Access to Open Science: Audio articles and open-source software in Acta Acustica”. Depending on the article type, the journal either mandates or strongly encourages the publication of additional research data in a public repository, as well as inclusion of a data availability statement and data/code citations in the article itself.