With our last issue, JCISE completed five years of publishing. Since our first issue came out in March 2001, we have produced 20 issues containing 217 articles, of which 170 were full length research papers. Our average review time is around 2.5 months and the overall acceptance rate after two review cycles is around 35%. Paper submissions have climbed at a steady rate of 15–20 % a year. Since our page quota is fixed (400 pages maximum annually) and our acceptance rates have not changed significantly, our backlog of accepted papers waiting to be published has grown to about 6–9 months. This is a healthy number since it allows journal publication to proceed on time.
In 2005 we gained a new sponsor: the Design Engineering Division (DED) of ASME became a full partner with the CIE Division to sponsor JCISE. As part of the agreement, DED gets two seats on the JCISE advisory board which is responsible for setting policies and approving associate editors. Profs. Bahram Ravani and Alan Parkinson are currently DED's representatives and, as per agreement, the Chairmanship of the advisory board now rotates to DED. Prof. Ravani will be Chair for the current year. We look forward to strengthening our ties with several of DED's technical committees, particularly the Design Automation, Design for Manufacturing, and Design Theory & Methodology Committees. Best papers from their respective conferences will now have two avenues for journal publication: this journal (JCISE) and the Journal of Mechanical Design.
We thank all authors, reviewers, and particularly the associate editors who do the bulk of the work. Almost the entire group of founding associate editors is gone after having completed the maximum of two terms permitted by ASME. Drs. Ravi Rangan and Simon Szykman, our Application Track associate editors, have just completed their terms, as have Profs. Paul Wright and Kunwoo Lee. We thank all of them for their valuable service. New appointments in 2005 included Dr. Jan Vandenbrande of Boeing in the area of Geometric Modeling, Prof. Jim Oliver of Iowa State in Virtual Environments, Dr. John Michopoulos of Naval Research Labs in Simulation, and Prof. Leo Joskowicz of Hebrew University in AI/KBS. Also, starting in 2006 we have Prof. S. K. Gupta of the University of Maryland in the area of CAM/CAPP.
I have also completed my five year term as this journal's chief editor. Recognizing that JCISE is at a critical juncture in its evolution, I have accepted a second term and I thank the CIE and DED Executive Committees for their vote of confidence. We certainly need to maintain the high quality of the journal, continue to grow submissions and subscriptions, and to bring new related communities to JCISE. We need to consolidate our relationship with DED and attract more good papers from that community. The challenge is to maintain the sharp focus we currently have on research that has applications in mechanical product development. Additionally, statistics computed by formulas created by citation services have come to pass as “quality measures” of journals. I will refrain from commenting on how well these measures actually represent quality, but they have become a fact of life in the publishing world. In 2004, JCISE was accepted into several major citation indices, such as the Extended Science index. We now need to keep an eye on these numbers as they become available and take steps to do well in comparison to our peer journals, despite the disadvantage of size (number of pages published annually).
We also welcome Prof. Rich Riesenfeld, School of Computing at the University of Utah, as a new member of the JCISE advisory board. He is well known for his pioneering work in computer-aided geometric design, a term that is often attributed to him. He will be replacing Prof. Chris Hoffman as one of the at-large members. Prof. Hoffman's service to JCISE for the past five years has been invaluable and I thank him for his contributions. The other at-large position will be filled by Prof. Paul Wright of UC Berkeley. Prof. Wright is no stranger to JCISE. He is well known for many innovations in the CAM area, the most recent of which is exploiting the power of the internet to provide manufacturing services.
I invite all our readers to feel free to send comments and suggestions directly to me or to any of our associate editors or advisory board members listed on the inside cover. Thank you.
