A New age for JIEM

Journal of Industrial Engineering and Management JIEM, 2016 – 9(3): 583-585 – Online ISSN: 2013-0953 – Print ISSN: 2013-8423 http://dx.doi.org/10.3926/jiem.2039 A New Age for JIEM Vicenc Fernandez Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (Spain) [email protected] Abstract: This editor’s note has a twofold objective: (1) to present a brief summary of the history of the journal, including the main goals that the journal has achieved during its nine-year history, and (2) to present all the changes that the editors of the journal have made during the last year in order to re-launch the journal and position it at the top in its field. We focus on issues concerning the quality of the journal, the scope, the prestige (progress in indexation) and the social responsibility of the journal. Keywords : JIEM, editor’s note, past and future 1. Introduction In 2007, four researchers at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya made the decision to create an open access scientific journal, with the goal of publishing theoretical and empirical articles aimed at corroborating and extending existing theories, while building new theories that contribute to advancing our understanding of phenomena related to industrial engineering and industrial management in organizations in 6 areas: (1) Production, Logistics, Quality, and Operations Research, (2) Industrial Economy and Regional Development, (3) Management, Organizational Behavior and Human Resources, (4) Finance, Accounting and Marketing, (5) Information Systems, Technology and Communication, and (6) Education, Training and Professional Skills. -583- Journal of Industrial Engineering and Management – http://dx.doi.org/10.3926/jiem.2039 Since the foundation of the journal in 2008, it has published 463 scientific papers in 21 regular issues, 2 thematic special issues and 6 special issues related to conferences. Some of these papers have had a very great impact on the scientific community. A list of the most frequently citied papers from the Journal of Industrial Engineering and Management (according to Scopus) can be found in the Appendix of this editor’s note. In 2011, the editors of JIEM agreed to a bilateral agreement with the scientific publisher OmniaScience (http://www.omniascience.com) in order to improve the processes of the journal. OmniaScience allowed us to focus the efforts of the editors on the academic and scientific processes, leaving less scientifically valuable activities, such as the layout of articles and issues, to expert designers. The editors, together with the OmniaScience staff, have indexed the journal in several international databases and repositories. More especially, the journal has nine bibliometric indicators, such as the SCImago Journal Rank and ESCI (Emerging Sources Citation Index) - Thomson Reuters, appears in three databases with bibliometric indicators and has agreements with 23 repositories, directories and libraries. The general statistics of journal show more than 3,000 registered users (remember that it is not necessary to be registered with the journal to read the published papers). Author Survey Results also show a high level of satisfaction by the authors of the journal with regard to the quality of interactions with editors, the speed and efficiency of the processes and the quality of reviews. 2. The Future of the Journal After nine years, the journal editors conducted a historical analysis in order to develop a long-term strategy for the journal. After analyzing both historical and external data, the editorial team decided to make the following decisions regarding the future of the journal. The first is related to the scope of the journal. After examining the manuscripts submitted and published over the last nine years, we identified that more than 90% have been in the area of Production, Logistics, Quality and Operations Research. With the goal of continuous improvement and taking into account the current editorial board, the review board and the majority of the authors, we decided to update the scope of the journal to: Production, Logistics, Quality, Operations Management and Operations Research. We hope that this decision will help readers and authors in this field locate more papers related to their research. Moreover, the editorial team will be able to dedicate all of its resources to just one field, in order to introduce the journal further into the scientific community. On the other hand, the editorial team has also decided to re-design the internal processes of the journal. Now, the average time from the submission of a manuscript until the first decision is made, subsequent to -584- Journal of Industrial Engineering and Management – http://dx.doi.org/10.3926/jiem.2039 the review process, is twelve weeks. We have been working in order to reduce this time to just eight weeks. According to our forecasting, we believe that this goal will be possible within the next six to eight months. Finally, the editorial team, and especially I, believe that the journal needs new blood to implement all these changes. For this reason, I have decided to take a step back in order to allow a new researcher, Professor Juan A. Marin, to take on the position of Editor-in-Chief of the journal. These nine years at the helm of the journal have been amazing, watching the journal grow, and hearing researchers and doctoral students discuss the results of their works. I have met many people who have helped me a lot during these years. In particular, I would like to thank my colleagues and co-founders of the journal: Pep Simo, Jose M. Sallan and Mihaela Enache, as well as all my associate editors over these years: Mari Albareda, Josefa Mula, M. Victoria de la Fuente, Carlos Andres-Romano, Pilar I. Vidal-Carreras and Mincong Tang. I also want to thank all the reviewers, without whose work the journal would not be where it is today, and all the authors and readers who have participated in the journal. Thank you everyone! Journal of Industrial Engineering and Management, 2016 (www.jiem.org) Article's contents are provided on an Attribution-Non Commercial 3.0 Creative commons license. Readers are allowed to copy, distribute and communicate article's contents, provided the author's and Journal of Industrial Engineering and Management's names are included. It must not be used for commercial purposes. To see the complete license contents, please visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/. -585-