Abstract
This issue of Corrosion Engineering Science and Technology represents an innovation: it is a ‘hybrid’ issue, consisting of both printed and online-only content. While the print issue has the normal appearance and page extent, an additional 212 pages, representing 30 research papers, are being made available online at the same time and as part of the same issue. The titles and page numbers of these online-only papers will appear in the contents list published in the printed version and subscribers can read them as normal on the journal's online site at www.ingentaconnect.com/content/maney/cest.
This experiment goes alongside other developments in online publication. Authors are now encouraged to incorporate supplementary material with their papers, which could include video files, animations and other content that is not compatible with standard journal format, or datasets or additional information that cannot be accommodated for reasons of space. These innovations, and the decision to publish a hybrid issue, are driven by the knowledge that a majority of our readers are now accessing and reading the journal online.
The publication of online-only content also allows us to address another issue that we all are concerned about and is of critical importance to authors; that is, to reduce the time between acceptance of papers and publication in an issue. Recent years have seen a significant increase in submissions and, despite the recent move from four to six and then to seven issues per year, and notwithstanding CEST's rigorous refereeing procedures that have raised the rejection rate to over 70%, there is now a considerable backlog of material. The hybrid issue will allow the journal to achieve its target of reducing the time from acceptance to publication in an issue to below six months by early 2012. Of course papers continue to be published online via the journal's Fast Track site as soon as proof corrections are returned, where they can be cited using their unique DOI, or digital object identifier, found on the first page of each paper.
All papers appearing in the online-only section of the issue have been peer reviewed in exactly the same manner as any other paper in the journal, and will be indexed on the same basis by ISI, Scopus and other indexing services. The papers appearing in the online section have been selected on the basis of date of acceptance, and we have confirmed that all authors concerned are in agreement. It is not planned to produce further hybrid issues in 2011. We shall review the situation for 2012, together with plans for other key projects such as digitisation of some of CEST's archive.
University of Manchester, UK
Los Alamos National Laboratory, NM, USA