Editorial

Citation

Goosey, M. (2008), "Editorial", Soldering & Surface Mount Technology, Vol. 20 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/ssmt.2008.21920aaa.001

Editorial

Welcome to Soldering & Surface Mount Technology issue 20-1, which contains an interesting and varied set of papers covering a number of topical subjects important to all those involved in electronics assembly. Since taking over the role of editor for this journal, the publications team at Emerald, and I have being working hard to bring the publications schedule back in line and I am pleased to see that that is now the fourth issue we have compiled in less than five months. The journal continues to attract a good quantity of very high-quality papers and there is thus a healthy supply of material to publish. However, before publication, all papers are subjected to a critical expert review and one of the problems we have faced in the past has been the time it takes from submission for a paper to pass through this review process. Quite often there will be a need for some revisions or extra detail to be included by the authors and the whole process can take several months. There was clearly a need to reduce the time this review process takes as I highlighted in my first editorial four issues ago. To this end, we decided to expand the team of international reviewers for SSMT and, in the last three months, we have added several new expert reviewers to our panel. This has already had an impact on turn-around time and, having a bigger pool of reviewers to choose from, has enabled papers to be guided to those that are both experts in the appropriate field and able to perform a relatively fast review. I would like to expand the team of reviewers further and therefore I am offering an open call to SSMT readers to provide their services. There is a formal application process to become a reviewer but the publishers would be delighted to hear from any of you with relevant expertise in a particular area.

Since taking on the role as Editor I have also taken the opportunity to expand the Editorial Advisory Board (EAB) of SSMT and we now have several new international experts who will supply additional inputs and expertise to the journal. One of the roles of EAB members is to identify key topics and potential papers that should be included in the journal. They also provide occasional editorials and conference reviews, etc. so by strengthening the EAB, we have an additional source of valuable and interesting material. For the future, and as the peer review process speeds up, we plan to increase the number of papers and other article content that we include in each issue of the journal. I also intend, from time to time, to produce themed issues that address a particular subject area or activity. SSMT's sister journal, Circuit World, has used this approach in the past and it has received a favourable response, so I see no reason why we should not achieve similar results with SSMT. We currently have two of these themed issues at an early stage of planning and I will provide more details as they start to take shape. Finally, I would like to invite you to let me have your thoughts on SSMT and, in particular, any suggestions, comments and recommendations for improvements, changes, etc. I would really value your inputs and I can be contacted at e-mail: m.goosey@lboro.ac.uk

Martin Goosey