Journal Update
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Letter from the President
Journal Update MRS is all about communication. We run the best meetings about materials, and our publications provide much of the very best technical information in our subject area. The MRS Bulletin has a unique format with its topical focus areas and has become widely recognized as one of the great resources for up-to-date comprehensive review material. The Journal of Materials Research, or JMR, provides a more traditional “learned journal” format in which materials researchers can publish original work in a fully refereed and archival organ. It competes with other learned journals on the basis of the quality of the papers, and the breadth of its topical coverage. Our Meetings and the MRS Bulletin enjoy these advantages, too, in addition to their individual distinguishing features. JMR was launched in 1986 to fill a gap in the materials literature—to be an interdisciplinary materials journal, mirroring the content of our technical meetings. Like most society-owned journals, JMR is run on a not-for-profit basis and publication in its pages does not depend upon membership in the Society. MRS members have the option to buy annual subscriptions at a lower cost than nonmembers, and I encourage all of you to consider doing so. The print version of the journal is better-produced than most, and— significantly for those who publish micrographs—it is printed on very highquality paper with excellent gray-scale reproduction. The journal is also available in electronic form, which has the great attractions of searchability and (of course) space savings. A succession of JMR editors, starting with Charles Duke, have guided the development of the journal to its present position, and the current editor-in-chief, Gordon Pike, continues to make significant improvements that will benefit authors and readers alike. Since it is difficult to see the changes simply by looking at the journal itself, it is worthwhile to review them briefly here.
“Our goal is to publish the. most significant work across the entire spectrum of materials research.”
Perhaps the most significant change this year has been a marked improvement in the speed with which articles are published. JMR had (like many other journals) suffered from a backlog of papers in the system, somewhere between submission, decision, and publication, and this backlog has now been eliminated. New tracking and publishing software has been brought on-line, and the average time to a decision on a newly submitted paper is now significantly under two months. All of the review process is now handled electronically, and some of the articles in the current volume have even appeared on-line within a month of first submission. This is a great tribute to the staff, the associate editors, and the reviewers alike, and speed of publication remains a high priority at JMR: Important work deserves to be published quickly.
Increasingly significant work is being published in JMR. The rate at which JMR articles are cited elsewhere has been increasing by more than 15% per yea
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