NOTE FROM THE EDITOR

Abstract

“If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.” - Henry Ford Taking up Henry Ford on his challenge, in February this year, the editorial team had a strategic session to discuss the journal’s positioning, and how we can better serve our authors and readers. As an outcome of this session: We are pleased with the positioning of the journal, as a fully accredited and ISI and Scopus indexed journal. Authors are using this journal as a learning platform to give our emerging authors the necessary exposure to the world of academic publishing. We would, however, like to remain a preferred publication for the more seasoned South African authors as well. According to ScimagoJR, the journal is at the high end of a Q3 journal, and we aspire to improve the rankings to that of a Q2 journal. We would like to publish 16-20 articles per edition. In order to do that, we identified bottlenecks in our current editorial process and have already implemented changes that are speeding up our process significantly. Thanks to the faster review process, we will not only publish more per edition, but have moved the target publication dates for the first two editions a month earlier, with edition 1 towards the end of April and edition 2 towards the end of July. Since the journal is owned by the South African Institute for Industrial Engineering (SAIIE), one of the SAIIE Annual Awards will now be for the best paper published in SAJIE. The journal is currently published using open-source software (OJS), using an old version of the software which is therefore no longer state of the art. We are busy investigating an upgrade of the system to a more recent version that will expose our authors, reviewers and readers to a more user-friendly and pleasant on-line environment. This will require that we take the journal off-line for a few days. This edition has a total of 14 articles, with nine from authors with South African connections and the balance from international authors. The publication date is 6 May, which is three weeks earlier than 2021, and the number of articles in this edition is already higher than the average in 2021 – a good indication that the decisions taken at our editorial team strategy session are having an impact! If you have suggestions on how we can take this journal forward, please let me know.