Page Budget Research Articles

Commentary from the Editor

I am happy to report another very active year for the journal and despite a substantial increase in our page budget from around 900 to 1200 pages, we continue to be fully extended and once again have ended the year with enough papers past the reviewing stage awaiting publication to fill the January and February issues of the journal. Erratum to ‘Commentary from the Editor’ [Neuromuscul Disord 23 (2013) 1–3]Neuromuscular DisordersVol. 23Issue 8PreviewFollowing publication of the Editor’s annual message in the January 2013 issue of Neuromuscular Disorders, which includes a list of experts who reviewed manuscripts in 2012, it has become apparent that the names of a number of our hard-working reviewers dropped off the list at some stage during the production process. We apologise for this and would like to now belatedly acknowledge the missing referees: Full-Text PDF

State of the Journal

During 2011, IEEE Transactions on Computers (TC) has maintained its position as a leading and prestigious publication in the field of computing. The number of manuscript submissions (inclusive of Special Sections) was 872 papers (at the time of writing this editorial in November 2011). The number of papers published was 139 papers plus approximately 140 additional papers were posted online as preprints (with an acceptance rate around 23.6%). Going by the number of papers received to date, I can guarantee you that 2012 will be another successful year for TC. The page budget stood at 1872 pages during 2011, which will maintained at the same level in 2012. As a measure of overall timely review, over the last 12 months the delay encountered from submission to fi rst notifi cation has been under three months. We are striving to improve this turnaround period and I am positive that this will be achieved due to the effort of the great team that we have. The Editor-in-Chie extends his gratitude to the wonderful team of Associate Editors, Guest Editors, reviewers, and IEEE Computer Society staff. Of course, we cannot forget our loyal authors and readers. A number of special sections have been published in 2011. TC does not publish special issues and the special sections are the mechanism used to enable the organization of mini special issues to publish on topical themes that are of importance to our readership. The themes covered in 2011 were Dependable Computer Architecture, Computer Arithmetic, Chips and Architectures for Emerging Technologies and Applications, Science of Design for Safety Critical Systems, and Concurrent Online Testing and Error/Fault Resilience of Digital Systems. The organization of such special sections will continue in 2012. Information on the scheduled special sections appears on the journal's homepage

Progress update and a look ahead

The Editor-in-Chief (EiC) begins by reporting that in 2012 we have had more than 1100 new paper submissions. In comparison, during the prior four years, TCAS-I constantly received approximately 900-1000 new paper submissions on each year. While all regions increased the number of their submissions, a slightly higher increase from Region 10 (Asia/Pacific) has been noted. We are presently trending at a solid 100 new papers submitted each month and expect a new record of submissions this year. The outstanding challenge, however, is the publication backlog. An accepted paper takes about 4-5 months to be electronically pre-published in IEEExplore and about 9 months and up to 1 year from final decision to be published in print. To address that the CAS Society generously allowed us to increase our 2012 page budget from 2700 pages to 3100 pages. We are continuing our special issue on the IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS) as well as the special section on the IEEE Custom Integrated Circuit Conference (CICC) which complements, with more system oriented papers, the Special Issue on the conference published every year in the IEEE JOURNAL ON SOLID-STATE CIRCUITS. You will see them again in the May and the August issues respectively.

Microbial Biotechnology: evolution of your premier journal

Dear Readers, Microbial Biotechnology (MBT) is undergoing a number of interesting changes that we would like to report. The first is its transition to an author-pays open access model from 2013. We believe open access will offer the journal a number of advantages, including the flexibility to grow without the constraints of a page budget, and substantial increases in exposure, with all articles being made freely available via Wiley Online Library and PubMed Central. MBT's transition to open access will significantly benefit both authors and readers, and hence the field of biotechnology as a whole. The Journal will continue to be editorially independent and its editorial team will continue to apply ever increasing standards of peer review, thus ensuring that the journal continues to be the high quality publication we know and value. Another is that MBT was assigned its first Impact Factor at the end of June and, since that time, has experienced a significant increase in submissions. As has been the case with its sister journals, Environmental Microbiology and Environmental Microbiology Reports, this rise in submissions will translate into an Editor-implemented rise in quality–originality threshold for acceptance, which in turn will positively influence subsequent IFs. Given the steady increase in exciting science we receive, we are confident that MBT will experience healthy increases in IF over the coming years. An important characteristic of MBT is the strength of its Editorial team – its Editors, Editorial Board and army of ad hoc reviewers, composed of leaders in the different sectors of microbial biotechnology, leaders both in the sense of representing the field and in pioneering the way forward. It is these dedicated scientists who set the benchmark for the field and for the papers that are published in MBT. They do this by providing constructive, critical reviews on submissions and by submitting their own work, and thereby ensure that MBT publishes some of the best research from high profile groups. The Editors are deeply indebted to the dedicated selfless support of its Editorial Board and ad hoc reviewers: thank you all for your tremendous support! The declared goal of MBT is to promote the field of applied microbiology, inter alia by stimulating young researchers to carry out original research on novel topics at the interfaces of the various disciplines that impact on biotechnology. It does so not only by showcasing important developments by leading groups, but also by profiling topics and new developments the Editors consider will lead to ground-breaking discoveries. One means it employs to do this is to publish Special and Themed Issues on such topics, edited by top researchers in the field. Exciting recent ones have been on Microbial Vaccines and Immunomodulators (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/mbt.2012.5.issue-2/issuetoc) edited by Carlos Guzman, Ennio de Gregorio, Jan ter Meulen and Martin Friede, and Microbial Resource Mangement (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/mbt.2012.5.issue-3/issuetoc), edited by Nico Boon and Willy Verstraete. Another means is the Web Alert of Larry Wackett which assembles the best websites for relevant diverse aspects of applied microbiology. A third is the biannual original, sometimes provocative, Crystal Ball series, in which international experts speculate on the key new developments/theories/paradigms that will drive discoveries in the field over the following years. This feature, which appears in the first issue of the year, always creates considerable interest and, in some cases, amusement. Take a look at the 2013 CB in this issue. And finally: check out below the most downloaded and most cited papers in MBT (see the MBT website for latest updates) to see who is publishing what in hot interest-generating biotechnology. Top downloaded articles Marine genomics: at the interface of marine microbial ecology and biodiscovery Karla B. Heidelberg, Jack A. Gilbert, Ian Joint Bacterial persistence increases as environmental fitness decreases Seok Hoon Hong, Xiaoxue Wang, Hazel F. O'Connor, Michael J. Benedik, Thomas K. Wood Strategies for discovery and improvement of enzyme function: state of the art and opportunities Praveen Kaul, Yasuhisa Asano Natural products for cancer chemotherapy Arnold L. Demain and Preeti Vaishnav Anaerobic benzene degradation by bacteria Carsten Vogt, Sabine Kleinsteuber, Hans-Hermann Richnow Top cited articles Metabolic engineering to enhance bacterial hydrogen production Maeda, T; Sanchez-Torres, V; Wood, TK Identification of furfural as a key toxin in lignocellulosic hydrolysates and evolution of a tolerant yeast strain Heer, D; Sauer, U Microbial degradation of lignin: how a bulky recalcitrant polymer is efficiently recycled in nature and how we can take advantage of this Ruiz-Duenas, FJ; Martinez, AT Microbial reporters of metal bioavailability Magrisso, S; Erel, Y; Belkin, S Indole and 7-hydroxyindole diminish Pseudomonas aeruginosa virulence Lee, J; Attila, C; Cirillo, SLG; Cirillo, JD; Wood, TK So, submit your best work to MBT, participate in its upward march to become the flagship of microbial biotechnology research, and your paper may be in one of these lists in future!

Changes Ahead for the Bulletin in 2013

Changes Ahead for the Bulletin in 2013

Open Access Musings

Open Access Musings

A brief report on the state of the IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems

According to the 2011 Science Citation Index (SCI) Journal Citation Report released by Thomson Reuters in July 2011, our impact factor and five-year impact factor are 2.234 and 2.748, respectively���the highest among all publications in the transportation section. Except for the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON VEHICULAR TECHNOLOGY, which ranked number eight with an impact factor of 1.485, and the IEEE Vehicular Technology Magazine, which ranked number ten with an impact factor 1.184, all remaining journals in the top 26 list in the transportation section are from the transportation or civil engineering fields. In addition, the average time from submission to first decision has decreased from 175 days in 2008 to 156 days in 2009 and 123 days in 2010. From submission to final decision, the average time has dropped from 361 days in 2008 to 273 days in 2009 and then 231 to days in 2010. For 2011 paper submissions that had completed the review processes, the tentative average time from submission is 86 days to first decision and 116 days to final decision. Overall, we have achieved a 51% and 68% reduction in the average time to first decision and final decision, respectively, from 2008 to 2011. As of February 2012 at the Board of Governors meeting in Atlanta, GA, we have a backlog of 71 accepted papers, among which 21 were to be submitted, 10 were submitted and to be proofed, and 40 have been proofed and rapid posted. Compared with the backlog of 95 in October 2011, we have seen some improvement. The past three years have witnessed a steady climb in the number of accepted papers per month. From six in 2009 and nine in 2010, this number has increased to 15 in 2011. Assuming a reasonable annual increase of 5% and an average of 10 pages per paper, we can reasonably predict that the page budget should increase from the current 1680 to 1920 and 2040 in this year and 2013, respectively.

How can we make publishing less painful?

The Times They Are a-Changin ' in the world of scientific publishing, and just like Bob Dylan and the music industry, we have now moved into an electronic age in publishing. This digital revolution has made it less of a risk to start new journals with new business models and has allowed the proliferation of a wide range of open access online-only journals. This change and the response it has generated from traditional subscription model journals, together with numerous other developments that have improved accessibility, has started to make it much easier for scientists to find information. However, one area that remains a major area of concern to many of us [1] is the process of getting a paper published. The peer-review system of course remains the backbone of the scientific system, but many scientists see inefficiencies and perceive unfairness in the way the system has evolved. Essentially peer review is the quality-control system for published science, designed to validate the veracity of the results and conclusions of a scientific study. However, for many journals, space is at a premium and editors are invariably faced with more submissions than there is space … The Times They Are a-Changin ' in the world of scientific publishing, and just like Bob Dylan and the music industry, we have now moved into an electronic age in publishing. This digital revolution has made it less of a risk to start new journals with new business models and has allowed the proliferation of a wide range of open access online-only journals. This change and the response it has generated from traditional subscription model journals, together with numerous other developments that have improved accessibility, has started to make it much easier for scientists to find information. However, one area that remains a major area of concern to many of us [1] is the process of getting a paper published. The peer-review system of course remains the backbone of the scientific system, but many scientists see inefficiencies and perceive unfairness in the way the system has evolved. Essentially peer review is the quality-control system for published science, designed to validate the veracity of the results and conclusions of a scientific study. However, for many journals, space is at a premium and editors are invariably faced with more submissions than there is space …

State of the Journal

During 2011, IEEE Transactions on Computers (TC) has maintained its position as a leading and prestigious publication in the field of computing. The number of manuscript submissions (inclusive of Special Sections) was 872 papers (at the time of writing this editorial in November 2011). The number of papers published was 139 papers plus approximately 140 additional papers were posted online as preprints (with an acceptance rate around 23.6%). Going by the number of papers received to date, I can guarantee you that 2012 will be another successful year for TC. The page budget stood at 1872 pages during 2011, which will maintained at the same level in 2012. As a measure of overall timely review, over the last 12 months the delay encountered from submission to fi rst notifi cation has been under three months. We are striving to improve this turnaround period and I am positive that this will be achieved due to the effort of the great team that we have. The Editor-in-Chie extends his gratitude to the wonderful team of Associate Editors, Guest Editors, reviewers, and IEEE Computer Society staff. Of course, we cannot forget our loyal authors and readers. A number of special sections have been published in 2011. TC does not publish special issues and the special sections are the mechanism used to enable the organization of mini special issues to publish on topical themes that are of importance to our readership. The themes covered in 2011 were Dependable Computer Architecture, Computer Arithmetic, Chips and Architectures for Emerging Technologies and Applications, Science of Design for Safety Critical Systems, and Concurrent Online Testing and Error/Fault Resilience of Digital Systems. The organization of such special sections will continue in 2012. Information on the scheduled special sections appears on the journal's homepage

Papers we reject

You have accessMoreSectionsView PDF ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmail Cite this article Berry Michael 2012Papers we rejectProc. R. Soc. A.4681http://doi.org/10.1098/rspa.2011.0564SectionYou have accessEditorialPapers we reject Michael Berry Michael Berry Google Scholar Find this author on PubMed Search for more papers by this author Michael Berry Michael Berry Google Scholar Find this author on PubMed Search for more papers by this author Published:08 January 2012https://doi.org/10.1098/rspa.2011.0564We are publishing many fine papers across the whole of the physical sciences, but here I want to focus on those we do not publish. Our current rejection rate is approaching 80 per cent. This is partly a result of the journal's popularity: we receive many more submissions than our page budget allows, so there are some good papers we simply do not have space for. But our main reasons for rejection are different: papers are too specialized for our readers, or report advances that are incremental rather than fundamental.For a paper to be publishable it must report work that is correct and new. But these obvious conditions are not sufficient, as this absurd example demonstrates: 3921×4723=18 518 883. This result is surely correct, and has almost certainly never been published: it is ‘new’. To be publishable in Proc. R. Soc. A, much more is required. In addition to the criteria listed on the journal's home page (‘high-quality, original, fundamental articles of interest to a wide range of scientists’), I like to see an element of surprise. And in connection with ‘new’, I ask authors to delete the strident phrase ‘for the first time’: would they be submitting a paper if it were ‘for the second time’?Perhaps unsurprisingly for such a prestigious journal, we receive a steady stream of papers proposing a new theory of the universe, or a replacement for Einstein's relativity, or an ‘obvious’ proof of the Riemann hypothesis. Such papers usually fail several tests that any new idea must satisfy: demonstrable consistency with everything existing theory can explain, quantitative explanations of what existing theory fails to explain and/or unambiguous prediction of something not yet observed. Rejecting them takes much of our Editorial Board members' time, because, although we are under no obligation to publish any article that we receive, we recognize the seriousness of all authors, including those who are mistaken. Authors of rejected papers sometimes complain that their discoveries are being suppressed, but they are now free to publish on the Internet (if they do, it could constitute prior publication, disqualifying their papers from Proc. R. Soc. A).To avoid misunderstanding, I declare that we welcome speculative papers that meet our quality standards. My own view is that all our current scientific concepts are probably wrong, but in a very specific sense: they will eventually be discovered to be special cases of much more general theoretical schemes (just as quantum mechanics superseded classical, by revealing it as a limiting case). I would be delighted if the paper that sparks the next scientific revolution were published in Proc. R. Soc. A, but such an advance will have to surmount a very high barrier indeed. Next Article VIEW FULL TEXT DOWNLOAD PDF FiguresRelatedReferencesDetails This Issue08 January 2012Volume 468Issue 2137 Article InformationDOI:https://doi.org/10.1098/rspa.2011.0564Published by:Royal SocietyOnline ISSN:1471-2946History: Published online08/01/2012Published in print08/01/2012 License:This journal is © 2011 The Royal Society Citations and impact

Editorial

Editorial

State of the Journal

State of the Journal

Evolutionary Applications open to all.

Since the launch of Evolutionary Applications in 2008, the journal has won the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publisher's publishing award for the best new journal, has achieved an impact factor of 5.14, published many landmark special issues, and perhaps most importantly, has rapidly established itself as a highly respected and reputable journal, ranking among the top 10 journals in the field of evolutionary biology. As we enter our fifth year of publication, our main goal continues to be to publish the highest quality research in applied evolutionary biology. To achieve this goal, we encourage you to submit your best work that uses evolutionary biology to address pressing issues related to medicine, climate change, invasion biology, conservation, fisheries and aquaculture, agriculture, forestry, and toxicology. We also are striving to remain current and relevant to the scientific community at large. We recognize the importance of maximizing the visibility and accessibility of the research published in Evolutionary Applications both to increase its impact and to comply with funder mandates. To help achieve these goals, the publishers, with the support of the editorial team, have decided to convert Evolutionary Applications to an author-pays open access model. Evolutionary Applications thus becomes the first highly ranked journal to join the Wiley Open Access portfolio (http://www.wileyopenaccess.com) and will benefit from a number of advantages that confers. This open access initiative combined with our unique double-blind reviewing process and the fact that we remain the only journal specializing in applied evolutionary biology reaffirms our status among the most innovative journals in the field. Everyone will be now able to read Evolutionary Applications irrespective of specialty, host institution, or location. The journal will also be able to grow in size without the constraints of a page budget and thus keep better pace with our yearly increase in submissions. Authors will retain their own copyright as all articles will be published under a Creative Commons license. We hope that you share our excitement in this new development for Evolutionary Applications. We also take this opportunity to warmly thank all of the authors, reviewers, associate editors, and members of our advisory board for their hard work and dedication, which together has made the journal the high-quality publication it is today. We welcome any comments or suggestions from our readership, and as always, we welcome your best papers.

A Global Surgical Journal

A Global Surgical Journal

Editorial: Media Center

IT is my pleasure to announce the creation of the IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems’ (TPDS) Media Center. We hope that the center will attract more readers to the journal, and assist our readers by facilitating their introduction to the latest development in the fi eld, ranging from the design of systems used in some contributions, new exciting technologies, to demonstrating new networking paradigms and solution approaches in the fi eld. It should further promote “systems” content in TPDS as opposed to traditionally prevailing “networking” content, although the latter is by no means excluded from the center. I have appointed new Associate Editor-in-Chief, Yunhao Liu, to handle the TPDS Media Center, together with his associates. He is involved in sensor network and RFID system constructions from hardware design through application development, and has a number of research contributions arising from these systems, primarily on localization, routing, operating systems, network diagnosis and management, and security. He is the principal scientist for the GreenOrbs project www.greenorbs.org in the TianMu mountain and urban sensor network in WuXi, China, each with more than 1,000 deployed sensors (collecting various sensory data, including temperature, humidity, illumination, and carbon dioxide titer), currently the two largest sensor deployments in the world. Yunhao Liu is among the top 10 author contributors to TPDS, and served as a TPDS associate editor before this appointment. His biography appears on the next page and contains a number of distinguished achievements. The TPDS Media Center is designed as a multimedia webpage for this scholarly archival journal. In the Media Center, TPDS will interview outstanding researchers or engineers for their experiences and opinions on a variety of theoretical or technological topics. Meanwhile, we warmly welcome and encourage editors, authors, or volunteers to share and advertise their state-of-the-art projects or ongoing research studies relevant to the topic of parallel and distributed systems through this Media Center. Activities and call for papers (or special issues) of TPDS will be announced through this multimedia platform as well. Each article in the Media Center is in the form of a blog composed by some multimedia content, like a video and audio clip, as the main medium, and supported by certain brief text descriptions. We hope to leverage such brand new features of the Media Center as a driving force for worldwide researchers to contribute high quality and live research results to the community. We hope that you can actively participate in its growth and make it a great success. In order to facilitate the contribution from peer researchers, we have set up an executing board of the Media Center to handle the content submissions from peer researchers. While the current board includes the Assistant EIC, Yunhao Liu (Professor at Tsinghua University, yunhao@greenorbs.com), Executive Chair, Mo Li (Assistant Professor at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, limo@ntu.edu.sg), and the assistant, Zhenjiang Li (lzjiang@cse.ust.hk), we will look for the expertise review opinions and inputs from the TPDS AEs as well as the research community. There are two categories of multimedia content that you can contribute. 1) The authors of an accepted regular TPDS paper are encouraged to submit their multimedia content along with their TPDS paper, which we will later select and publish on the media center. 2) Meanwhile, readers are also encouraged to directly submit their content to the executive chair Mo Li (limo@ntu.edu.sg). We’ve provided an FTP site (ftp://transMedia:media2011@ftp.computer.org) to receive the submission of multimedia contents, or you can fi rst publish the submission to some other places (Youtube, your own FTPs, etc.) and send the content links to us. TPDS has resolved its backlog issue, and papers are now published within approximately six months from their acceptance. To meet our annual page budget for 2012, page limit for the main fi le for most papers is back to its maximum, 14 pages. Each paper is still divided into two fi les, the main fi le (which replaces previously called “shortened version”) and the supplementary fi le. TPDS also resumed with organizing special issues. In 2011, calls for papers for two special issues were advertised, one on cyber-physical systems and another on cloud computing. I welcome proposals for future special issues. I take this opportunity to welcome and introduce new distinguished researchers to the Editorial Board of TPDS. Song Guo, David Kaeli, Bronis R. de Supinski, and Kui Wu were appointed as new Associate Editors, starting September 2011, while Manuel E. Acacio joined the board earlier, in April 2011. Their short biographies and areas of research are given below. I am confi dent they will contribute to further enhancing the quality and timelines of TPDS. Fabrizio Petrini, Masafumi Yamashita, John Lui, Sampath Rangarajan, and Cheng-Zhong Xu completed their four-year terms as TPDS editors in September 2011. Their help and dedication in processing papers is greatly appreciated.

Evolutionary applications summer 2011.

Evolutionary applications summer 2011.

Keeping the Balance

749 Given the various measurements of journal quality and the needs of our readers, how will we proceed? We will monitor our improvement using the impact factor, Eigenfactor, and SCImago information. My 5-year goal for improving the impact factor was for the AJR to reach 4.0 by the end of my tenure as editor in chief. This was ambitious, but I wanted to set the bar as high as possible. Our record with the Eigenfactor and SCImago systems is quite positive. Structural changes in the journal with the introduction of subspecialty section editors have enabled us to improve our original research and review manuscript submissions. In fact, overall submissions continue to grow in our electronic environment. Journal citations are equal for print and online articles, so the reduction in the page budget should have little impact. Our online products (residents’ section, SAMs, and CME and video articles) and other manuscript categories (pictorial essays, technical innovations, commentaries, and editorials) are essential to meet the needs of our readers but are not likely to improve the impact factor. So what is the plan? We must monitor the impact factor and other journal ranking scores and meet the needs of our readers. Both goals are essential to the success of the AJR and to keep the needed balance of article categories for our readers. We are eager to obtain the results of our most recent readership survey, which should be available by the middle of April. Hopefully, the data obtained in the survey will enable us to further refine our vision to ensure continuous improvement in the AJR. Thomas H. Berquist Editor in Chief ajrsubmit@arrs.org DOI:10.2214/AJR.11.6524

Note from the Editor Regarding this Special Issue

Studies of the Subak: New Directions, New Challenges a collection of papers edited by Nitish Jha and John W. Schoenfelder is a welcome addition to Human Ecology’s list of special issues focusing on important topics in research and theory. Often collections such as this have an impact greater than merely the sum of the individual articles. Nitish Jha, John W. Schoenfelder and their colleagues have made outstanding contributions here across a number of disciplines all sharing a focus on the water management systems of one island, Bali, the study of which has energized and informed research on water management and distribution on several continents. Since the practical constraints attending a bimonthly peer reviewed journal require that we make full use of our page budget, we have included two additional articles not selected by our guest editors. Both seem singularly appropriate here as they deal with water, its scarcity, and the myriad issues attending its use and distribution. Zongze Hu uses an unusual but effective perspective to document and understand villagers’ efforts to secure a reliable supply of drinking water in a rural community in North China. He views this through the changing fortunes of the Ninth Dragon, a water god whose rise, fall, and ultimate reinstatement as an important deity reflects village politics and disputes over water, as well the efforts of the central government to secure local control and authority. In this fine grained account, the ponds, the canals, the ditches, the wells, the water towers, the water pipes, and the water switching station are all indicators of the political power and mobilizing abilities of different generations of village leaders. The resurgence of the Dragon’s worship since the early 1980s partly resulted from the state’s more relaxed ideological control, but it has facilitated the emergence of a new group of religious leaders who compete with secular leaders for influence and authority. Ayron Strauch and Astler Almedon, in a paper using both qualitative and quantative data, examine traditional resource management among the Sonjo in rural Northern Tanzania, with particular reference to catchment forest protection and water quality, which is often overlooked in studies of water management. They document the ecologically relevant TRM and describe the differences between traditionally managed water sources and formal government managed resources. Their insightful examination of traditional methods of water conservation and users perceptions of water quality provides insight into how communities in resource-stressed regions thrive despite seasonal droughts and flooding.

Editorial: One Year as EiC, and Editorial-Board Changes at TNN

IAM ABOUT to start my second year of service as the Editor-in-Chief (EiC) of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON NEURAL NETWORKS (TNN). Needless to say, my first year as the EiC has been full of excitement and challenges. Transitioning this position from my predecessor to me went very smoothly during the months of September 2009 to January 2010. During the past year, we have accumulated 50+ Associate Editors (AEs) handling roughly 600 new submissions (not counting resubmissions and revised submissions). With the help of these AEs and my predecessor, I was quickly able to learn to do my job, and as such, the transition had very few glitches. The easy part of my job is checking whether a submission is in compliance with our guidelines and where it is within the scope of the TRANSACTIONS, before it is assigned to an AE for handling. The difficult part of my job has been dealing with some papers with three or more reviewers, all of whom agreed to review them but for some reason failed to respond to repeated automatic-review reminders. AEs handling these papers have to take several extra steps to remind reviewers through phone calls or e-mails, look for replacement reviewers, or review the papers themselves. Most authors have been appreciative of the work of the AEs and reviewers, and they accept our decisions without a problem. The backlog of papers has been kept short over the last year. We have maintained an organized printing and paperacceptance schedule, with papers typically printed in the journal within 2‐3 months of acceptance. Our page budget has been kept constant in the past few years (roughly 2060 pages per year), and we expect to hold the same page count for next year.

Editorial

Editorial