Editor's Note: EIC Farewell and New EIC Introduction

Abstract

IT is my great pleasure to announce that Professor David Bader has appointed as the next Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (TPDS), who will start his term on 1 January 2014. David has a highly distinguished academic career. I am quite sure that he will provide excellent leadership and bring a great deal of technical and managerial experience to TPDS. Please join me in congratulating David on his appointment. His brief biography appears below. As my term as Editor-in-Chief ends, I thought you would be interested in knowing how we are doing in TPDS. I have listed a few statistics during my term 2010-2013. The number of submissions doubled from 681 in 2009 to 1,272 in 2012 (and 1,322 for a year ending 31 August 2013). The number of editors also doubled, from 32 to the current number 66. The acceptance rate is approximately 25 percent. The average time from submission to the fi rst decision has been reduced from 4 months to 80 days, while it took, on average, 90 days from submission to the fi nal decision. The average time from submission to online publication has been reduced from 43 weeks to 36 weeks (median is 33 weeks), and each accepted paper has received at least three reviews. As you can see, we are a highly competitive journal with a fast turnaround time similar to conferences. However, the added advantage of submitting to our journal is getting detailed reviews with a possibility of addressing the drawbacks in a paper through a major revision. This does not happen in conferences. I attended three times each IPDPS and ICDCS, two main related conferences, to meet our editors and authors and attend steering committee meetings. To control the backlog (currently about one year from acceptance date to the scheduled publication date), I pioneered the division of papers into the main fi le plus supplementary one, with the main fi le restricted to currently 10 pages (reduced from 14) and with supplementary fi le with the text of practically unlimited size. A by-product of this conversion was increased readability of the main fi le; to help it further, one of my editorials was devoted to presenting articles with the goal of minimizing the time for a reader to understand the essence of the contribution. I was extremely lucky and honored to be given this leadership opportunity, and would like to thank many people who have made my tenure as Editor-in-Chief both rewarding and enjoyable. I am especially grateful to the staff in the publication offi ce of the IEEE Computer Society, Pam Gimzo and Carrie James for their help in day-to-day operation of the paper review and publication process, and Hilda Carman, Erin Espriu, Joyce Arnold, and Alicia Stickley for their help in many administrative and production matters related to TPDS. I often rely on their expertise to resolve diffi cult issues related to the paper review process. Last, but not the least, I would like to thank all of our authors, reviewers, and associate editors for their support and hard work for TPDS during the past four years. About 5,000 reviews were made in 2012, to select papers for TPDS, and efforts by reviewers receive little visibility due to the anonymous nature of reports. The IEEE CS started, at the end of 2012, the Reviewer Appreciation Program, to recognize distinguished reviewers for each transaction (see the April 2013 editorial of TPDS). The key enabler for this program is the reviewer statistics, which is made available by S1M, following my few requests in 2010 and 2011. I used it in making decisions on new TPDS editors (as one of factors). The information fi nally became available (for all CS transactions) in a reasonable size (excel) and sortable fi le during 2012. The scope of TPDS has been recently updated to refl ect the latest and exiting developments in the area, such as many-core systems, network on chips, cloud computing, social networks, wireless networks, and cyber-physical systems. I hope you will continue to submit your best papers to TPDS and continue our effort to keep TPDS the fl agship journal in the fi eld of parallel and distributed systems.