The ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing is this organisation's official organ. The journal, published by Elsevier six times per year, will as of January 2010 switch to time-based publishing as the mechanism for assigning accepted contributions to issues in which they will appear. This will shorten the time between acceptance and publication of contributions.

Fixed-size Issues
The annual page budget for the ISPRS Journal is currently roughly equally spread over the six issues. When too few accepted manuscripts are available for a pending issue it is duly delayed until sufficient material has accrued for a full one. If the number of accepted manuscripts exceeds the space available in a pending issue, more recently accepted manuscripts cannot be included and are placed in a queue to be published at a later date. In either case authors may experience delays in publication of material accepted.

Time-based Publishing
Time-based publishing will not alter the six times per year appearance of the ISPRS Journal. The publication dates of these issues are fixed in advance. All accepted material typeset at the time of compilation of the next issue will be included in it. There will be no queue of material accepted for publication but awaiting placement in future issues. Publication dates will also be kept when there are only few contributions ready for publication. Thus time-based publishing will ensure a shorter lapse of time between acceptance and publication. Because the number of accepted manuscripts varies over time, the size of published issues of the journal will also vary.

Waiting to Appear
At of the time of writing, the ISPRS Journal has a queue of about thirty contributions accepted for publication, equivalent to about three issues. For the purposes of migration to the time-based publishing principle, these manuscripts will all be included in the final issue of 2009 and the first few of 2010. After this no queue will build up again.

Impact Factor
As the time between submission and publication is shortened, it will become easier to publish manuscripts citing articles that appeared over the two preceding years. The number of these citations determines the impact factor of a journal. Time-based publishing may therefore help to secure the ranking of the ISPRS Journal among the remote sensing journals: currently third out of fifteen, with an impact factor of 2.293.