Editorial

Abstract

I am very pleased to be asked to take over the role of Honorary Editor of Journal of Physics G: Nuclear and Particle Physics from Professor Peter Paul. It is a great honour and I am looking forward to continuing the work he has done. Under his guidance and leadership, the journal has been an important vehicle for the communication of new results and ideas in the various fields covered by this wide-ranging journal, and I would like to take this opportunity to thank him for all of his work over the last three years. For those of you who are already regular readers and contributors to the journal, I look forward to your continued input and support. For those of you who have not yet joined our band of authors, I would encourage you to do so. We, as professional physicists, are proud to publish in the journals of our very own professional societies. The support for our own non-profit journals ensures - in times of crunching budgets for libraries - a strong future for the publications in our fields. Journal of Physics G, published by the Institute of Physics, is one such journal. Our aim in Journal of Physics G is to serve as a forum for both theoreticians and experimentalists, covering the large amount of varied work carried out in the fields of basic principles of the structure and dynamics of elementary matter: whether it is particle physics, nuclear physics or particle astrophysics. During Peter Paul's leadership, the journal has increased its visibility in the very active fields of relativistic heavy-ion physics and the quest for the quark-gluon plasma (for example, the Special Issue on strange matter which appeared in December 1997), and it is also moving into the emerging new area of the physics of radioactive beams. The journal is devoted to strengthening this pursuit of novel, expanding fields in the near future, and I intend this to be a major part of the development of the journal. All those involved with the journal feel that maintaining a presence at the cutting edge of the research in our field is crucial. The journal is also at the forefront of developments in publishing technology. It has been available on-line since 1996 ( http://www.iop.org), free of charge to all registered institutional subscribers. The on-line edition includes full text, maths and graphics, and papers appear weeks before the paper edition is printed, bringing additional benefits to readers and authors. Electronic submission of articles to the journal has been available since January 1997, and has proved extremely popular with authors (see the journal homepage for more details), as a service that is valuable, saving the author both costs and time, flexible and efficient. This year, there are yet more exciting developments. A five year archive of the journal will be available from early 1998, giving full text access to articles dating back to 1993. The IOP's other innovation is available to subscribers now: HyperCiteTM lets you link directly from an article's references to INSPEC's database of abstracts dating back to 1969, preprints held at Los Alamos, or to the article itself if it is in another IOP title to which you subscribe. It will also give information about papers that cite a particular article - thereby working both forwards and backwards in time! This service has great potential as an asset to the whole community, and it is hoped to expand it yet further in future. Finally, I would like to thank the Editorial Board for their hard work and enthusiasm over the years in support of Journal of Physics G. I also thank the staff of Institute of Physics Publishing, especially Sarah Quin and John Haynes, for their dedication and hard work on behalf of the journal. H Stöcker, Honorary Editor Journal of Physics G: Nuclear and Particle Physics