Editorial

Abstract

Dear Readers, It is a great pleasure for me to welcome you to our first regular issue in 2021 covering 3 very relevant and novel articles in various computer science topics. There are also many news and changes with the beginning of the new year that I am excited to report on and share. To start with, we are very happy to welcome two new consortium members and editors-in-chief: California Polytechnic State University San Luis Obispo represented by Prof. Christian Eckhardt from the Department of Computer Science & Software Engineering and the Institute for IDEAS at American University in Washington DC represented by Prof. Krzysztof Pietroszek. On the management side of J.UCS, Dana Kaiser has retired at the end of last year, and on behalf of the journal I want to gratefully thank Dana for her devoted and great work since the foundation of this journal. I also want to give Johanna Zeisberg a warm welcome who will take over the role as Publishing Manager and collaborate and support the whole J.UCS community. On the technical side, our journal has moved to another submission and publishing platform. Since the foundation of J.UCS more than 25 years ago, the journal has offered readers, authors and editors various novel features over the course of the years. In this perspective but also in terms of the visionary view of founding a freely accessibly online journal, I want to express our deep gratitude for the contributions of Prof. Hermann Maurer to the success of J.UCS for almost 20 years. Since beginning of 2021, J.UCS is hosted by Pensoft Publishers Ltd. on the ARPHA Publishing Platform. This allows us not only to offer state-of-the-art publishing features but also to make use of integrated long-time archiving systems and various indexing services. In this context I also want to thank Internet Studio Isser and Photographer Christian Trummer for the kind support in the development of the design update and the J.UCS images. In this first issue of the year, I also want to look back on the journal’s achievements in 2020. We are proud to report a total of 11 issues with 74 articles on novel aspects of various topics in computer science; to be more specific, 51 articles have been published in 7 special issues and 23 articles in 4 regular issues. Since last year, J.UCS publishes under the open access Creative Commons License CC BY-ND 4.0 and therefore provides even more value und openness to a broader community. In 2020, we counted more than 87 thousand unique visits and almost 65 thousand paper downloads. This success is only possible due to the great support of the involved institutions, reviewers and authors, and I want to gratefully thank them all for their valuable support and work. Over the years we have not only offered readers open access to our high-quality journal, but we also do not charge our authors publication fees. This adventurous approach together with a rigorous review process and a broad support by the community resulted in a valuable contribution in the field of computer science, which is reflected in the high number of unique visitors and article downloads. In this context I gratefully thank all consortium members for their financial support of J.UCS. I am looking forward to continuing the cooperation with our editors, the editorial team and the technical support to maintain the success of J.UCS. I would be very grateful for suggestions and feedback on how we can even improve and develop J.UCS in the future. In this regular issue, I am very pleased to introduce 3 accepted papers from 5 different countries. On the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the J.UCS journal, Nelson Baloian, José A. Pino, Gustavo Zurita, Valeria Lobos-Ossandón, and Hermann Maurer analyze and discuss a bibliometric overview of the first 25 years of the journal in their collaboration between Austria and Chile. In a collaborative research between China and Spain, Xin Liu, Xiaoying Song, Wei Gao, Li Zou, and Alvaro Labella Romero report on their decision making approach based on hesitant fuzzy linguistic-valued credibility reasoning. And finally, Christian Moreira Matos, Vitor Kehl Matter, Marcio Garcia Martins, Joao Elison Da Rosa Tavares, Alexandre Sturmer Wolf, Paulo Cesar Buttenbender, and Jorge Luis Victoria Barbosa from Brazil discuss a collaborative model to assist people with disabilities and the elderly people in smart assistive cities. Enjoy Reading!