Andy Lim has kept things running smoothly at our editorial office throughout the transition period;. I have come to rely on her extensive âcorporate memoryâ when.
IEEE JOURNAL OF OCEANIC ENGINEERING, VOL. 38, NO. 3, JULY 2013
409
Editorial
I
am writing this short message to introduce myself as Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE JOURNAL OF OCEANIC ENGINEERING. I took on the role last autumn, following the untimely death of my predecessor, Bill Carey. Bill was a man of high personal and professional integrity, and the JOURNAL benefitted greatly from his leadership during his two terms as EIC. Although I have had some experience as a guest editor of two special issues, under the circumstances, my introduction to the job was right into the deep end. But I have had great support from two previous EICs, Jim Lynch and Chris de Moustier, who helped guide me through some of the initial challenges. And, we have great professional expertise in both our editorial office and at IEEE Publications. Andy Lim has kept things running smoothly at our editorial office throughout the transition period; I have come to rely on her extensive “corporate memory” when confronted with new problems. I also appreciated the patience and advice from our contact at IEEE Publications, Joanna Gojlik, throughout the learning process since I took over. I want to give an indication of my priorities and plans; as they become fleshed out, I will provide more details in subsequent editorial messages. The scope of the JOURNAL is very broad, and no EIC is an expert in all aspects of research in ocean science and engineering. We have an excellent group of Associate Editors who are qualified experts in their fields and, just as important, are dedicated to arranging for timely reviews of the manuscripts that they are asked to handle. As was done by my predecessors, I will rely on their expertise in making decisions to accept or reject manuscripts that are submitted to the JOURNAL. Since becoming EIC, I have appointed several new Associate Editors who bring different expertise to the group, and increase our capacity to handle papers in new and growing fields of research. I continue to look for qualified help in areas such as Arctic Ocean engineering and ocean energy, and would welcome offers from individuals who would like to make a contribution to the JOURNAL as Associate Editors. As a group, we all need to work together to help reduce
the time between submission of a manuscript and publication in the JOURNAL. In the past, the JOURNAL has been a showcase for developments in new and emerging fields of ocean research in the many special issues that featured collections of papers. I am committed to continuing this practice, and encourage suggestions for new special collections. We will work with individuals to help get the message out to authors who can contribute articles. I also encourage suggestions for papers that provide reviews and updates on specific research areas. Related to the special collections, I can give a heads-up of an initiative that I am working on now for promotion of papers from OCEANS conferences to manuscripts that can be considered for publication in the JOURNAL. This initiative has had a long history with much discussion over many years before I became EIC. In the longer term, my goal is to establish a regular special collection of “best papers” from the OCEANS conferences in each year. Setting up the procedures for this will require discussion with others in the IEEE Oceanic Engineering Society who have similar objectives. In the short term, the first step in the longer process is to write guidelines for authors to follow in writing OCEANS papers that can be developed into manuscripts for the JOURNAL. Manuscripts that are essentially close copies of OCEANS papers are not suitable for review in the JOURNAL; OCEANS papers are documents that reside on IEEE Xplore and are citable but they are not peer reviewed. The guidelines will help those who want to promote developments of their OCEANS papers for peer review in the JOURNAL. A draft of the guidelines is being prepared now. More on this later. Finally I am keenly aware of the JOURNAL’s standards of high quality of its published papers. Closely related to this is the ethical standard that is demanded of authors in submitting original work. I want to assure authors and readers that I intend to maintain the standards of ethical publication that Bill and others have established.
N. ROSS CHAPMAN, Editor-in-Chief
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/JOE.2013.2271543
0364-9059/$31.00 © 2013 IEEE
