Jan 1, 2006 - many. I had the privilege of working with many Associate Ed- itors who are the very best in their fields. Their dedication and help made my job ...
IEEE PHOTONICS TECHNOLOGY LETTERS, VOL. 18, NO. 1, JANUARY 1, 2006
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A Farewell Editorial Happy New Year! I hope the New Year brings happiness, health, and prosperity to all. It also brings my second and last term as the Editor-in-Chief to an end since IEEE LEOS bylaws limit this term to two consecutive three-year periods. As my appointment comes to an end, I would like to share the changes that took place over the last six years and express my appreciation to many individuals. Both the field of photonics and its flagship journal IEEE PHOTONICS TECHNOLOGY LETTERS (PTL) went through significant changes since I took over as the Editor-in-Chief on January 2000. The year 2000 was a boom year for photonics. In that year, we had 771 submissions and only one full-time staff person working for PTL. This was an important drop from the previous year’s submissions of 860. Most submissions were through regular mail as paper copies. Papers were sent to me, Associate Editors, and reviewers using fax through the editorial office. I remember sometimes getting as many as 35 pages of fax for a paper, which included original submission, reviews, first decision, revised manuscript, Associate Editor’s comments, and some supporting material. Once a final decision was made on a paper, I had to shred all the documentation. This continued in 2001 and 2002 with 780 and 1043 submissions, respectively. 2002 marked the beginning of a rapid surge in submissions especially from the Pacific Rim Countries. This surge overloaded our fax-based system and editorial office. To remedy this situation, we started to use a digital sender in 2001 to send the papers to Associate Editors and reviewers as PDF file e-mail attachments. We also increased the permanent staffing for PTL to two. These changes improved the efficiency and convenience of PTL operation while saving countless trees. Ironically, at this time, commercial activity in photonics slowed considerably. But since 2002, submissions continue to increase. In the years 2003 and 2004, we had 1362 and 1456 submissions. This year, submissions are estimated to reach 1600. This places a considerable amount of strain on a letters journal whose aim is timely publication of important results. To deal with this issue, we first started online rapid posting of accepted papers in September 2001. This was not really an online publication since papers were posted before the issue was complete. The page number of a paper in an issue was not known since the table of contents was not finalized until the issue was complete. Nevertheless, this provided an earlier posting of accepted papers. In 2003, we also started to use a web-based system called Manuscript Central. This move improved the efficiency of handling papers tremendously. It also became very convenient for everyone to participate in PTL operation as authors, reviewers, and Associate Editors. Reports became readily available to identify bottlenecks. An up-to-date reviewer database which enables
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LPT.2005.862196
Associate Editors to rate the reviewers is another very important aspect of this system. Over the years, not only the volume but the quality of PTL also improved significantly. The impact factor of the journal reported by ISI improved from 2 to 2.6 from 2001 till 2004. This improved the ranking of PTL to 14th among more than 200 electrical engineering journals tracked by this organization. Our efforts to improve the quality and timely publication of PTL continue. Starting in 2006, PTL will be published twice a month online. A paper will be published online as soon as the author proof corrections are implemented. Every online paper will be a complete publication with an electronic identifier, year, number, page number, and volume information. This change will speed up the actual publication of accepted papers significantly. In a given year, there will be 24 PTL online issues. Four of these issues will be grouped in paper copies that will be published six times a year. Details of this process were described in the previous editorial. I am very happy to announce that starting January 2006 the new PTL Editor-in-Chief will be Dr. Christopher Doerr from Bell Laboratories Lucent Technologies. Dr. Doerr comes with a very distinguished research record and worked as a PTL Associate Editor over the last six years. He also served in technical committees of many conferences and is an elected member of the LEOS Board of Governors. His area of expertise covers a very wide range extending from the design, fabrication, and testing of novel multiwavelength semiconductor lasers to optical interconnects, add drops, and dispersion compensators. I am confident that he will do an excellent job as Editor-in-Chief. During my tenure I worked with many LEOS editorial staff. Without their expert help, it is impossible to publish this quality journal that LEOS can be proud of every month on time. I thank them all on behalf of myself and the photonics community. At the beginning, I worked with Fran Jetko, April Nakamura, and Sylvia Flores. After Fran retired in July 2000, Linda Matarazzo took over as the supervisor of the LEOS editorial office and Sylvia Flores became the main person for PTL. I also worked with many temporary staff, some of whom moved to other LEOS journals as permanent staff. Now, the second full-time staff position is filled by Claire Tan-Yan. Over the last two years, the staffing and the operation have been very stable thanks to the efforts of these folks. I will always be grateful to Sylvia, Claire, and Linda for the competent and professional manner in which they did their jobs. This is a total community effort and thanks are in order to many. I had the privilege of working with many Associate Editors who are the very best in their fields. Their dedication and help made my job much easier. As someone who reads all the reviews, I also developed a great sense of appreciation for all the reviewers for their constructive criticism. It is a remarkable experience to see how a publication takes a much better shape during the review process. I also thank the LEOS Board of Governors, LEOS Vice Presidents for publication Robert Lang and
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James Coleman, and LEOS Executive Director Paul Shumate for their support and confidence in me. Finally, I acknowledge the mentorship and guidance of the former PTL Editor-in-Chief Joe Weller. He always gave me good information and advice while leaving the decisions to me. I also would like to take this opportunity to welcome new Associate Editors to PTL. They are: Markus-Christian Amann of the Technical University of Munich, Germany, Keren Bergman of Columbia University, Anders Bjarklev of the Technical University of Denmark, Denmark, Bill Burns of Photonics Systems Inc., Lian-Kuan Chen of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, China, Jen-Inn Chyi of the National Central University, Taiwan,
IEEE PHOTONICS TECHNOLOGY LETTERS, VOL. 18, NO. 1, JANUARY 1, 2006
Anand Gopinath of the University of Minnesota, and Fred Heismann, private consultant. These individuals distinguished themselves as experts in their technical areas of interest and their time and dedication makes PTL the premier journal it is. As I bid you farewell, I thank all members of the photonics community who actively participated in the PTL operation and encourage others to do so.
NADIR DAGLI, Editor-in-Chief University of California at Santa Barbara Santa Barbara, CA 93106 USA
