Editorial

Abstract

This issue of 2014 celebrates one year of successful use of the new manuscript management system, which significantly helped in having the review process under strict control and in reducing the review processing time while preserving and increasing the review quality. Scope assessment and assignment to associate editors is now performed in a few days. The average time from the manuscript submission to the first decision is about 2 months, whereas the average time to the final decision is about 2.5 months. Unfortunately, the variance of these parameters is still rather high, but with the help of the associate editors and reviewers, we are working hard to reduce it. The journal is continuously attracting increased interest from authors: Submissions are growing more than 600 per year. The efficient review process ensures the high quality of the journal: Only 22% of the submitted papers are accepted for publication. We are also working to reduce the backlog of papers published in the IEEE Xplore as advance posting but not yet physically printed. However, it is worth noting that advance posting a paper means publishing it since a unique DOI is associated with it and is not changed when the paper is physically printed, i.e., citations to advance posted papers count. The Editor-in-Chief also provides an overview of the technical articles and features presented in this issue.