Page Budget Research Articles

Editorial

Microbial activities and products have been employed in the service of Humankind since the dawn of civilization. Though microbial biotechnologies broadened in range over time, a quantum quantitative and qualitative increase was heralded in by the gene technology revolution in the 1970s. Over the current and coming decades, a further quantum increase will be catalysed by a combination of an acceleration in accessing new microbial diversity, particularly through intensified exploration of our biosphere, (meta)genomics approaches, new developments in instrumentation and miniaturization (e.g. micro-fluidics), analytical procedures, and increasing development and application of systems and synthetic biology, on one hand, and driven by commercial, medical and societal demands for new and improved products and processes, on the other. The vast range of unexplored microbial diversity, and the pervasiveness of microbial activities influencing biosphere functioning and human endeavours and well-being, have recently precipitated a major research expansion in environmental microbiology. Despite this intensification of effort, more than 90% of microbial diversity still remains to be discovered. It is this new biodiversity that will become the treasure chest of new and improved biotechnological developments and applications in the sectors of chemicals, pharmaceuticals, energy, mining, materials, agriculture, food, environmental protection, etc. As exploration of new microbial diversity will reveal novel underlying catalytic reactions, metabolic activities and products, many of the applications resulting from these discoveries will be highly original and innovative. Such applications merit publication in high profile journals. Currently, there exists only one high impact journal, Nature Biotechnology, which explicitly includes microbial biotechnology research, but this journal covers all types of biotechnological research (microbial, plant, animal), and has a small page budget, so is only able to accept a small fraction of top research papers in microbial biotechnology. All other journals focusing on microbial biotechnology are currently of modest impact. This means that there is not only a paucity of options for placing top work in top journals, but also that the field of microbial biotechnology has no dedicated high profile vehicle that provides leadership in setting high benchmarks of quality and originality, effectively disseminates top research, and stimulates and promotes the field. Microbial Biotechnology has been created to publish papers of original research reporting significant advances in any aspect of microbial applications. In selecting and publishing the best original, innovative research and enabling advances that may lead to new applications, it aims to rapidly become the high profile flagship of microbial biotechnology. To achieve this, it has appointed a sterling Editorial Board, composed of leaders in the various sectors of the field and associated fields, and a core of experienced and dedicated Editors who, together, will apply rigorous reviewing and quality selection to assure the highest quality, originality and actuality of the published material. A key selection criterion is that material considered for publication belongs to the upper 25% of research in the field. Much research in cutting edge microbial biotechnology is multidisciplinary in nature and, with new advances and creative exploratory science, the topics and component disciplines range over an ever-increasing spectrum of the life and non-life sciences. Thus an important feature of Microbial Biotechnology will be the inclusiveness of its scope, which will widen in response to all developments that can lead to significant new applications involving microbes or their activities or products. For this reason, the specified scope of the Journal is only a guideline and will expand to incorporate new advances. As part of its aim to promote the field, Microbial Biotechnology will feature both primary research papers and (mini)reviews, editorials and correspondence, as well as regular features, like ‘Web Alert’ and ‘Genomics Update’. Particularly topical themes will be the focus of Special Issues. As part of its aim to provide a greater focus for, and understanding of, microbial biotechnology and its societal benefits, and to achieve wider dissemination of the work it publishes, Reviewers and Editors will flag up research articles of particular interest to the general public and these will be the subject of press releases. Microbial Biotechnology joins the extremely successful stable of microbiology journals of Wiley-Blackwell. It benefits from the support of the Society for Applied Microbiology, which is one of the oldest learned societies dedicated to the promotion of applied microbiology, and a major global promoter of microbial biotechnology, and from the exceptional publishing experience of Wiley-Blackwell and its highly professional Production Office. So: enjoy reading this first issue of Microbial Biotechnology, anticipate the issues to come (free access for 2008!), and start to prepare your best material for submission for publication in a future issue!

Editorial

The past year brought yet another record number of submissions to the digital doortstep of Ecological Applications: 686 manuscripts, an 11.3% increase over calendar year 2005. Of the final decisions made by our Editorial Board in 2006, 28% were acceptances, a slight increase over the previous year. The new submissions continue to reflect increasing interest in ecological problem solving, and we are pleased to see submissions in areas of ecology not previously heavily represented in the journal. In response to the increase in submissions and to avoid penalizing either the journal's traditional areas of excellence or the emerging areas relative to each other, the journal requested an increased page budget from the ESA. Over the past year, we have published larger issues (some with more than 400 pages). Beginning this year, we are increasing the number of issues to eight per year. The new issue schedule will mean that papers can appear in print and be posted online sooner after acceptance. We have made dramatic progress over the past few years in decreasing the time to publication (as is evident from the manuscript histories printed as footnotes to each published paper). It is increasingly common to see papers submitted as regular articles published within a year of submission. The backlog of accepted papers awaiting publication is essentially a thing of the past, thanks primarily to the increased page budget. There have also been payoffs resulting from the efforts to encourage authors to submit more concise papers as Communications, as well as the increasing use of Ecological Archives for digital publication of information not integral to accepted papers. Shorter papers can be reviewed, revised, and copy-edited more quickly than the standard articles of the past. In addition, we can publish more of them in a given issue, while still keeping within the page budget. ESA journals are international in both scope and authorship. Only about half of the corresponding authors of submitted manuscripts reside in the United States, and 39% are from countries where English is not the official or principal language. At the “What Editors Want” session organized by ESA's Student Section for the 2005 ESA meeting in Montreal, the journal editors were asked to establish a mechanism for assisting authors whose native language is not English in preparing manuscripts for submission to our journals. The Governing Board enthusiastically endorsed this idea, and so we established an online Bulletin Board at http://www.esa.org/authorhelp/ where individuals can express their willingness to help. We are very pleased to see that roughly 70 individuals have volunteered their services. We thank them for their willingness to help ensure that our journals will serve the international ecological community and that language will not be a barrier to publication of the very best ecological science in our journal. We are grateful that so many ESA members are willing to devote their expertise and valuable time to helping us achieve this goal. We want to remind our authors of the establishment of ESA's official Data Registry at http://data.esa.org. The editors strongly encourage the registration of data sets associated with manuscripts submitted to ESA journals. Links to the Data Registry from the Instructions to Authors and in the acceptance letters from the Editorial Board members should facilitate the registration of data by our authors. Our hope is that the Data Registry will serve as a mechanism for “data discovery,” leading to communication (and possibly collaboration) between researchers and to meta-analyses. The first published papers with links to Data Registry information are appearing in the January and February issues of Ecology. We hope to see an increasing number of papers published with this information in the coming years. Data registration simply serves to announce the existence of data and to provide contact information. By registering data, one does not relinquish rights to research findings. In fact, the registry may serve to establish precedence for ecological studies. Our hope is that the Data Registry will eventually be linked to Data Archives containing the actual data referred to in the registry, and that all data underlying published papers in ESA journals will be readily available for purposes of verification, replication, and meta-analysis.

Diabetes Care: Building on Strength

I am deeply honored to be taking on the role of editor-in-chief of Diabetes Care . The journal has gone from strength to strength in the last few years, and retaining this momentum toward a higher level will, of course, be a challenge. First, we must acknowledge and thank outgoing editor-in-chief, Mayer B. Davidson, MD, and his team of associate editors and editorial board members for their leadership in making the journal such a tremendous success. In particular, Mayer has steadfastly kept the journal on the right track, leading to it becoming the premier clinical journal addressing the worldwide epidemic of diabetes and its complications. I am particularly grateful for Mayer’s guidance during my previous term as an associate editor and for his outstanding mentorship that prompted me to step into his shoes. Diabetes Care has grown consistently since its inception in 1978 and has undergone spectacular growth in the last 5 years. This statement is easily supported by statistics comparing the year 2001 with 2005, which were the last available statistics at the time of this writing. The impact factor (a reflection of how often an average article is cited in future publications) grew from 4.9 to 7.8; based on that, Diabetes Care could be ranked 4th out of 89 journals in the fields of endocrinology and metabolism and 10th out of 107 journals in general/internal medicine. Not surprisingly, such success has borne challenges. The number of new submissions grew from 1,157 in 2001 to 2,572 in 2005. To stay within the allocated “page budget,” our acceptance rate has fallen from 40 to 23%. Obtaining reviewers for the increasing number of submissions has also become a significant challenge. Because of this, a pre-evaluation and priority ranking is made by the editorial committee to determine if a manuscript should be …

ONE for All: The Next Step for PLoS

Most science is not published in Science, Nature, Cell, or even PLoS Biology. Indeed, the increasing pressure of submissions, limited page budgets, and the existing reward system by which the value of a paper is placed not on its content but on the venue in which it is published has led most journals to reject a substantial fraction of papers before peer review. The reasons given for rejection are various: the editors may claim that the paper is beyond the scope of a journal, too specialized, of insufficient general interest, or lacking a sufficiently novel advance—even too complicated.

Reviewing Papers for JSE : A Plea to Authors, Potential Reviewers, and Readers

The Journal has experienced substantial growth in the last few years which resulted in an additional growth of 300 printed pages, a change in page budget in 2004. During this time, we have also experienced a high impact factor of 0.77 in 2004 which is among the highest for comparable journals in the field. The Immediacy Index for JSE exceeds all other structural engineering and related journals by a wide margin. The Impact Factor and the Immediacy Index are two standard metrics used to measure citations to journal articles over time. The build-up of citations typically follows a curve referred to as the “citation curve.” The impact factor is a measure of the relative size of the citation curve in the second and third years. It is calculated by dividing the number of citations to papers published in the two previous years by the number of papers published in those same years. The immediacy index, on the other hand, provides a measure of the skewness of the citation curve and is calculated by dividing the citations in the current year by the number of papers it publishes in that year. This is a measure of how quickly items in that journal get cited upon publication. While these figures are encouraging, there are some recent trends that are also a cause for concern. The most recent statistics for the Journal indicates that the median turnaround time from submission to publication has increased from 19 to 21 months, despite the fact that there has been an increased in printed pages. The primary cause for the increased turnaround time is mostly delays in the review process. While the blame can sometimes be attributed to Associate Editors handling the review of papers, some of the blame has also to point to those of us, who are called upon to conduct the peer review of submitted manuscripts. Since self-citations meaning citations in a paper to articles previously published in the same journal are included in the impact factor calculation, it is obvious given the 20+ month turnaround that the current impact factor of the Journal is generated almost exclusively by citations to JSE by papers published in other journals. A reduction in the mean turnaround time can contribute significantly to both the appeal of the journal and to further increasing the impact factor. I recognize that focusing on such metrics should not be the sole objective of a premier journal.

Editorial

Editorial

Macromolecular Journals and the People behind Them

Macromolecular Journals and the People behind Them

A Few Changes and New Directions for the Bulletin

A partnership between the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center and Oxford University Press became responsible for the Schizophrenia Bulletin with the January 2005 issue. We continued attractive and traditional features of the Bulletin including the cover art work provided by artists who also have schizophrenia, the “At issue” section for the presentation of novel concepts or controversial views, reports from workshops that address critical issues in the field, high-quality review papers and themes, and occasional commentaries. We have also published highly selected original articles, especially if the content is related to the theme issues. In the July 2005 issue, we introduced as special features a summary of information on a gene implicated in schizophrenia and a summary of information on an environmental factor considered relevant to the underlying etiology. These features are often cited and receive much attention on our Web site. Our thanks to Robin Murray for being associate editor for these features and Jim van Os and Mike Owen for arranging these quarterly contributions. We also planned a special feature entitled “Schizophrenia in translation.” Paul Shepard and Tom McGlashan will co-organize this feature, the first installment of which appeared in the July 2006 issue. There has also been a significant change in the processing of manuscripts. Average referee turnaround time is about 12 days—average time from submission to decision is just under a month (an apology to the few authors who experienced longer delays). Publications are available online about 3 weeks after final acceptance. We are also much in debt to all the guest editors of themes, who completed the task on time with excellent manuscripts. Feedback on the quality of paper and print and on the “on time” receipt of the Bulletin has been gratifying. We have maintained the Bulletin's tradition of affordable subscriptions. During this initial period of our stewardship, we have encountered one especially vexing problem; we are turning away too many high-quality manuscripts. With only 4 issues per year, over 80% of our page budget is currently devoted to publishing special features and theme-related (eg, invited) manuscripts. As a result, our rejection rate for unsolicited papers has approached 90%. We will ease this situation with the institution of 2 changes beginning in 2007. First, the Bulletin will be published on alternate months beginning with the January issue. This will increase our space by 50% and result in a modest increase in subscription rates. Second, we will limit the size of future theme issues, and some issues will carry only a single theme. These changes will not alter our primary niche as the field′s source for reviews, workshop reports, special themes, and features. However, it will enable us to be more responsive to selected, high-quality unsolicited articles that our referees judge to be of significant interest to the field of schizophrenia. With the changes noted above, we have added 3 people to our associate editor group. Robin Murray will continue in that role but no longer edit the gene and environment special features. Jim van Os and Mike Owen will assume these duties and have become associate editors, as has Tom McGlashan who will be responsible for the clinical concepts aspect of the “Schizophrenia in Translation” special feature. Beginning in January 2007, each issue will carry one etiology essay and one translation essay, thus alternating the gene and environmental features and alternating the neuroscience and clinical concepts translation features. We believe that we should do a better job providing critical assessment of clinical therapeutics including psychopharmacology, psychosocial treatments, integrated therapies, and system-based innovations. We welcome suggestions for other issues or special features that would help the Schizophrenia Bulletin contribute information to the field.

Editorial

A year ago, we announced the implementation of our totally web-based system for manuscript submission and peer review. We had beta-tested the system, but there was still some trepidation in the Publications Office about abandoning our tried-and-true procedures for a plunge into the ether. Today, those fears seem quaint. The new system has outperformed even our most optimistic expectations and has contributed significantly to our continued goal of publishing the best papers in applied ecological science in the most timely manner. On average, the papers in the present issue were received in their final form just over eight months prior to the issue date; 18 of the 29 papers in the issue are appearing in print (and online) within 18 months after they were submitted. Ten of the papers in this issue have associated appendices or supplements posted in Ecological Archives. This has helped our journal to keep pace with the increased submission rate (568 new manuscripts submitted to Ecological Applications during 2004). When papers are more concise, we can publish more of them in a timely manner without exceeding our page budget. This has enabled us to keep institutional subscription rates far below those of competing for-profit journals and to avoid any increases whatsoever in individual subscription rates over the past several years. Year after year, Ecological Applications has been ranked among the top journals publishing ecological science in terms of the ISI impact factors published in the annual Journal Citation Report. This, in conjunction with the annual increases in the rate of submissions and our level of selectivity (acceptance rates between 30% and 40% in recent years), indicates that Ecological Applications is the top journal for applied ecology. We thank our authors for continuing to send us their very best papers, and we are grateful to our Editorial Board and reviewers for their efforts to keep our standards high. We do not intend to rest on our laurels. Effective with this issue, authors now access PDF proofs via an ftp site, which especially benefits our overseas authors. We are also happy to announce that, beginning with articles published in 2005, we will provide authors with complimentary PDF files of their published articles. During the coming year we expect to add new functionality to the online journals, including enhanced cross-linking of references to published articles (not only to articles in ESA's family of journals, but also to ecological research in many other journals) and a forward-linking feature that will link published articles in ESA journals to papers that subsequently cite those articles. ESA journal abstracts will be accessible via Google searches and the extensive CrossRef database. We are also redesigning the online journals web page to give it a new look and make it more user-friendly. Finally, we are proud to announce ESA's participation in the Society Summit for Data Sharing (for a full report of the meeting, see pp. 61–64 of the January 2005 issue of the Bulletin of Ecological Society of America, available online at 〈esapubs.org/esapubs/bulletin/backissues/backissues.htm〉). We fully support the statement that “Our vision as members of the scientific community is to promote the advancement of science through the process documenting, archiving, and making available the research information and supporting data of published studies.” As a first step, we have adopted the following editorial policy: “The editors and publisher of this journal expect authors to make the data underlying published articles available.” This statement will now be included in every issue of Ecological Applications. As data registries and archives become more readily available, we will expect authors to register data and deposit metadata connecting published papers to the archived data underlying the results. These steps continue ESA's journals on a path charted by the leaders of the Publications Committee, the Future of Long-term Ecological Data (FLED) Committee of the 1990s, and the Ecological Visions Committee in advocating and taking responsibility for wide and easy accessibility of ecological data.

Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis, and Vascular Biology , 2005

The purpose of this editorial is to provide for our readers the annual update of the status of the journal. Goals of our editorship, which began in 1999, were to publish high-quality papers, provide authors with timely review and publication of their manuscripts, and to publish papers of interest to our readers. We will summarize data related to each of these goals, some changes and plans for the journal, and thank several people for their help. There is no perfect approach to evaluate journals and the quality of papers published in journals. Impact factor is one measure of quality of papers. In some Universities, decisions about promotion and tenure are based in part on impact factor of journals in which papers are published. Thus, impact factor may be important, in relation to selection of journals in which authors wish to publish their work. The impact factor for ATVB again increased this past year, to 6.8 (Figure 1). The impact factor of the journal has increased more than 70% during the past few years. The large increase in 1999 was determined by decisions during the editorship of Dr Alan Fogelman. Impact factors of other journals in this area of research have not changed consistently during the last few years (Figure 1). We believe that Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis, and Vascular Biology is recognized as an appropriate forum for publication of excellent papers related to atherosclerosis, lipoproteins, vascular biology, and thrombosis. Figure 1. Impact factor of ATVB , JBC ( Journal of Biological Chemistry ), T&H ( Thrombosis & Hemostatsis ), JLR ( Journal of Lipid Research ), Athero ( Atherosclerosis ) and AJP ( American Journal of Physiology – Heart and Circulation ) Immediacy index provides information about the frequency of references to articles during the first year of their publication. The immediacy index for ATVB has increased substantially in the past …

Introduction to the Special Issue on Multichannel Signal Processing for Audio and Acoustics Applications

HE IEEE Signal Processing Society has its roots in an area where acoustics, speech, and signal processing converge, as was reflected in the former name of the society when it was founded in 1974. The interface between acoustics, speech, and signal processing is still an area of great interest to the society, with many fundamental problems still unsolved. Research is driven by applications where acoustic signals have to be captured, transmitted, and/or reproduced in an acoustic environment that includes echoes, noise, and reverberation Considering human/machine interfaces as a major area of applications, it is obvious that signal processing becomes more challenging as the distance between humans and the machines increases, as the signal bandwidth increases, and as the acoustic environment becomes more complex and hostile. Increasingly sophisticated algorithms have been developed since the mid-1970s and along with the availability of greatly increased and affordable computational power, multichannel signal processing algorithms naturally evolved for exploiting the spatial dimension of acoustic signals. The importance and popularity of this field was well reflected by the large number of submissions to this special issue. The volume of high-quality papers could not be fitted into the page budget allotted to us. Thus, we regrettably had to decide to publish some of them in a second section of this special issue as part of a regular issue of the TRANSACTIONS in early 2005. For sound reproduction, where we want to provide a pair of desired signals at the listeners’ ear drums, seamless human/machine interfaces based on multichannel techniques have been implemented since the invention of stereo systems. However, providing the true spatial sound experience in large listening spaces became possible only with new multichannel signal processing techniques, such as wavefield synthesis. Still, major challenges remain, especially phase-true equalization of listening room acoustics and the cancellation of local noise sources and interferers. On the other hand, acquisition of audio and speech signals has been a research topic since the invention of the microphone and still today presents major challenges for the signal processing community. Structurally the simplest problem, the acoustic feedback from loudspeakers into microphones is addressed by acoustic echo cancellation: From the single-channel case which has been investigated since the 1970s, research has moved on to stereo and multichannel reproduction, recently culminating in a new wave-domain adaptive filtering concept which has been presented for the first time at ICASSP 2004. For removing unwanted interference and noise from desired signals, multichannel techniques utilize spatial diversity to discriminate between desired and undesired components, either by exploiting different spatial coherence properties or by beamforming, which directs a beam of increased sensitivity towards the desired source. For traditional beamforming, source localization is necessary if the location of the source is not known a priori. Reflecting current research emphasis in these areas, the paper by Cohen addresses filtering of the

The start of the 50th year!

The start of the 50^th year!

EDITORIAL

We are delighted to announce that Ecology has implemented a totally web-based system for manuscript submission. Authors no longer need to send hard copies or e-mail attachments to the Publications Office or the Editor-in-Chief in order to have their work considered for publication. Manuscripts may now be sent to the journal over the Internet in the original digital format (e.g., Word, WordPerfect, or LaTex), and there are several format options for figures, including JPEG, TIFF, and Excel. The new system will convert the files into a merged PDF for editors and reviewers. Please check 〈http://esapubs.org/esapubs〉 for current instructions before submitting new manuscripts. Peer review will be conducted via the same integrated system, with password-protected confidentiality for reviewers. Our hope is that the entire submission and review process will be expedited. We are confident that there will be significant savings in terms of postage and paper costs, both for ESA and for authors. Another benefit of the new system is that corresponding authors may check the status of their manuscripts on-line at any time. Authors and reviewers may also use the system to update their addresses and contact information. The Publications Office staff has worked diligently to test the new software during the last part of 2003. The aim has been to make the system as user-friendly as possible. Of course, we welcome feedback and suggestions from authors and reviewers for making further improvements. use of e-mail for submission of manuscripts and transmission of digital versions of manuscripts to reviewers; an increased page budget and the move to monthly publication, adopted in 2000; the establishment of Ecological Archives for digital publication of Appendices and Supplements; promotion of more concise submissions. The look of Ecology has evolved over the past few years, and it is not just the covers of the print versions that have changed. Published papers are shorter than in previous years. Most notably, nearly every issue now contains several Reports. These are papers that the editors and reviewers have recommended as both timely and important. The research findings in Reports should be of interest to all ecologists, and their concise format and prominent position in the journal are intended to promote a wide readership. We encourage authors to make every effort to trim submitted manuscripts to a length suitable for this section (20 typescript pages, maximum). (Manuscripts of similar length but on more specialized topics are published as Notes.) Authors can often achieve more concise manuscripts by shortening and focusing the Introduction and Discussion, and by reducing the numbers of figures, tables, and citations. We especially encourage the judicious use of Ecological Archives for publication of digital appendices and supplements (e.g., for methodological detail, full tables of statistical results, etc.). Excessive length may cause delays at every stage of the review and publication process. Longer manuscripts demand more time for evaluation by editors and reviewers and very often must go through extra rounds of time-consuming revision. On the other hand, we strive to expedite the processing of papers that are submitted as Reports. First, reviewers and editors are encouraged to complete their evaluations more quickly. Once accepted for publication, Reports are moved ahead in the copy-editing queue. Finally, Reports are often pushed ahead to the next available issue upon receipt of corrected proofs. We are also striving for a new level of concision in regular articles and in Concepts and Synthesis papers. Submissions longer than 30 typescript pages must now be accompanied by a cover letter that explains and justifies the length. The new policies are intended to raise the interest of readers, increase the number and disciplinary breadth of papers we can publish, and speed the rate of publication.

In honor of James A. Weston and the neural crest

In this issue of Developmental Dynamics, we focus on James A. Weston (JAWs) and the neural crest. The issue includes a review (Shop Talk) of JAWsFest, a meeting on the neural crest held in Weston's honor at Mount Hood, Oregon; an overview of Weston's science, written by Carol Erickson, University of California at Davis; and several submitted articles from some of the participants in the meeting. The neural crest is a fascinating population of cells, of which we know much, but of which we still have much to learn. Weston's contributions to the field are immense, and his inspiration still lingers. We are proud to publish some of the exciting results presented at JAWsFest in Weston's honor. With the publication of a review of the JAWsFest meeting, held in honor of the life, work, and “retirement” of Dr. Weston, we launch a new section of Developmental Dynamics called “Shop Talk.” “Shop Talk” is designed to highlight important meetings in the field of developmental biology and to convey a sense of the excitement of some of the avant garde work presented at the meeting. To review JAWsFest, we are pleased to bring together a diverse team of scientists interested in the neural crest: Susan Chapman, King's College and the University of Utah; Deb Hanken, NICHHD, NIH; David Raible, University of Washington; and Kathryn Tosney, University of Michigan. I welcome suggestions for future meeting reviews, as well as for reviewers, and I hope that you will enjoy reading “Shop Talk.” Finally, perhaps you have noticed that this month's issue of Developmental Dynamics has a leaner (but not meaner) look. Yes, for 2004, we have slimmed down, but although we are thinner, the number of papers published per issue has actually increased. Then, how have we slimmed down and how does that help science? Well, we have slimmed down by switching to a new press that allows us to use different weights of paper. Thus, we have switched from a 70# paper to a 50# paper, which decreases page thickness by 32%—a substantial slimming down. Yet in comparison tests with the old and new paper (by using a paper published in the journal), figure reproduction was actually improved with the new paper—definitely a benefit to our authors and readers. Also, the new press requires less press time and operator time, and thinner papers are, in general, less expensive than thicker papers, resulting in significantly reduced production costs. When I became Editor-in-Chief, we decided to provide free color to our authors, but of course, color is not free to the publisher (John Wiley & Sons) or to the American Association of Anatomists, both of which generously provide us with a color-cost subsidy. With reduction of printing costs, the publisher has agreed to return 100% of the savings directly to the journal to allow us to increase the number of pages of color published. This increase is both significant and important. Submissions to the journal have skyrocketed since January 2003, increasing our need for both a larger page budget and a larger color budget. Thus, by slimming down, Developmental Dynamics is further supporting science by allowing more of the best papers in developmental biology to be published without cost to its authors.

Toward Further Internationalization

Toward Further Internationalization

Circulation Research Editors’ Yearly Report: 2002

More than three and a half years after taking on the editorship of Circulation Research , we are pleased to put forth this edition of our yearly state-of-the-journal report. Manuscript submissions continued to increase, albeit modestly; nevertheless, the 1488 manuscripts received in 2002 set yet another yearly record (Figure 1). Despite increasing submissions and a static page budget, our acceptance rate of 21.7% (Figure 2) was comparable to that of the journal since 1993. Figure 1. Number of submissions to Circulation Research by calendar year for 1987 to 2002. Figure 2. Acceptance rate trend by calendar year for 1995 to 2002. Having pioneered online manuscript submission and peer review tracking among the American Heart Association journals, Circulation Research continued to see the fruits of its efforts in the time to first decision for original research articles (Figure 3). For Original Contributions, a first decision was rendered in an average of 3.2 weeks, while decisions were recorded on UltraRapid Communications and Reports in 1.9 and 1.8 weeks, respectively. The time to first decision for Review …

The Times, They Are Changing Again

The Times, They Are Changing Again

Editorial: introducing the new AEs

T the beginning of last year, the IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE) had a sizable backlog of accepted papers. I am pleased to inform our readers that we have received approval from the IEEE Computer Society for an additional 368 pages this year. This represents a 35 percent increase from the regular page budget of 1,048 pages. The page increase will clear out most of the backlog by the end of the year. It is my great pleasure to introduce two new members of the Editorial Board of TKDE: Professor Padhraic Smyth and Professor Kyu-Young Whang. They are internationally known and highly regarded for their work on knowledge and data engineering. We are very fortunate to have their services for the journal. At the same time, I would also like to thank the four retiring TKDE editors who have dedicated their time to manage papers over the past few years: Professor Ming-Syan Chen, Professor Christian Jensen, Professor Niki Pissinou, and Professor David Taylor.

Great news, hard choices, and opportunities for paleoceanography

I want to share some great news about Paleoceanography's scientific impact. Its high impact factor reflects the number, quality, and breadth of submissions. Unfortunately, the positive news must be tempered by the difficulties of page budgets, which force hard decisions for us all.

A mathematical model for assigning author page budgets in proposals

The author provides guidance in responding to US federal government procurements that include quantitative and qualitative evaluation criteria. Systematic analysis of the relative importance of all evaluation criteria in a request for proposal can optimize page allocations and ensure balanced treatment of customer concerns, thereby achieving a maximum proposal score. A method is presented for determining relationships among evaluation criteria, and thus for making meaningful allocations of pages for proposal sections and subsections. The model lends itself to desktop computer implementation.