ARTICLE IN PRESS

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doi:10.1016/j.co

Control Engineering Practice 14 (2006) 315–317

www.elsevier.com/locate/conengprac

Editorial

e front matter r 2005 Published by Elsevier Ltd.

nengprac.2005.11.001

This is my first editorial since taking over as the fourtheditor-in-chief of Control Engineering Practice on 1 July2005. I would like to thank my predecessors, Mike Rodd(1993–1997), George Irwin (1998–2002), and Dolf Glatt-felder (2002–2005) for their sterling work in making CEPwhat it is today. CEP is a popular choice for authorswanting to publish their control application related work,as is evidenced by the large number of directly submittedpapers and those that arise from IFAC conferences andother events—about 400 per year. About 12,000 CEPpapers are downloaded from ScienceDirect per month,further evidence of the popularity of the journal.

CEP continues to strive to meet the needs of industrialpractitioners and industrially related academics andresearchers. It publishes papers that illustrate the directapplication of control theory and its supporting tools in allpossible areas of automation. Organizations such as IFACand the IEEE CSS articulated the need for an archivaljournal focussing on control applications more than 15years ago (Abramovitch & Franklin, 2004; Rodd, 1993).Control journals at the time were becoming increasingly

theoretical, creating a void for more applied journals to fill.This trend towards theory appears to be increasing and issomething that CEP needs to guard against. Given thepopularity of CEP and other applied journals, the controlcommunity has to be congratulated on its foresight.During my tenure as editor-in-chief I will endeavour to

make CEP the journal of choice for authors to submit theirhigh-quality application material to, and for editors andreviewers to want to be associated with. In order to achievethis overall goal, many issues have to be addressed,including:

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The reputation of the journal.There are many facets to determining the quality andreputation of a journal. The most visible of these isperhaps the impact factor compiled by the ISI. CEP isfirmly established with a creditable impact factor thatappears to have stabilized at about 0.53. Strategies willbe put into place to improve this figure further, theresult of which will only become visible in 2007 andbeyond owing to the full pipeline of completed papers.

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Time to first decision.As control engineers we appreciate timely feedback. Wewill therefore endeavour to reduce the time to firstdecision as much as possible—the median time for 2004was 132 days. The editorial office, designated editorsand reviewers have a crucial role to play here. Theeditorial office should only send out good qualitypapers, in terms of both contents and language, forreview. Paper should also be relevant to the area ofexpertise of the designated editors and reviewers, takingcare not to overload any one individual. Due acknowl-edgement of reviewers and designated editors, and theefficiency of the editorial office are issues that will alsoreceive constant attention. � Time from final acceptance to publication.

At the current level of about 12 months, the periodbetween final acceptance and publication is too long. Weare three issues ahead of schedule, with a furtherapproximately nine issues’ worth of articles ready tobe published (see the ‘‘Articles in Press’’ section inScienceDirect). Given the huge inflow of papers and thenumber of papers already in the pipeline, the smallincrease in page budget allocated to CEP for 2006 willdo little to reduce the copy backlog. Other options willtherefore be explored.

The change of editorial office from Zurich to Pretoria wasas smooth as could possibly be, and for this I would like tothank particularly my predecessor Dolf Glattfelder, AndersHagstrom from the editorial office in Zurich, and ChrisGreenwell and Catriona Fennell from Elsevier. Anders didan excellent job in providing up-to-date information on eachpaper. Catriona, the training manager for the online ElsevierEditorial System (EES), ensured a smooth transition fromthe Author Gateway submission system to EES. Chris, thesenior publishing editor responsible for CEP, did anexcellent job of managing the transition.

The submission and paper handling process for CEP hasevolved significantly since its inception in 1993. From beingpaper-based during Mike Rodd’s tenure, it became fullyelectronic when Dolf Glatfelder took over. We arecurrently migrating to a fully online process based onEES. Since 1 July 2005 all new papers have had to besubmitted online at http://ees.elsevier.com/conengprac/.Elsevier’s Author Gateway at http://www.elsubmit.com/esubmit/conengprac/ is still used to complete paperssubmitted before 1 July 2005. Communication betweenauthors, editors and the editorial office takes place in EESfor new papers, and for papers submitted prior to 1 July2005, via e-mail and the Author Gateway.

The CEP editorial office at the University of Pretoriaconsists of Fernando Camisani-Calzolari, the journalmanager, and me. Fernando is responsible for the smoothfunctioning of the editorial office, a task that is compli-cated by the fact that we are running two systems inparallel. Besides the change to EES, the workflow remainsessentially the same as used by my predecessor (Glattfelder,

2002). I screen all directly submitted papers, giving carefulconsideration to quality and to the scope of CEP. Papersare sometimes referred to an appropriate designated editorfor a second opinion. Only papers that pass this initialscreening are sent for full review. With journal outputsplaying an increasingly important role in the performancemeasurement of academics the world over, the controlcommunity is generating more papers. Unfortunately, thepool of potential reviewers is growing at a much slowerrate, if at all, resulting in a significant increase in thenumber of review requests. The purpose of this initialscreening process is therefore largely to alleviate the strainon the peer review system.

IFAC and CEP

CEP is an IFAC journal and forms an important part ofthe service that IFAC provides to the control community.CEP regularly publishes special sections arising from IFACevents. The International Program Committee chairidentifies application-related papers that have the potentialto become good quality journal papers. Selected authorsare then invited to submit their upgraded papers to thejournal. The same standards apply to special section papersas to directly submitted papers and the criteria foracceptance are identical.IFAC Technical Committee (TC) chairs are ultimately

responsible for IFAC events in their areas of specialty.CEP relies on these chairs to ensure that their fields areappropriately represented in the journal. Furthermore, TCsare an important source of reviewers for CEP. We are verygrateful for the substantive reviews that TC memberstypically provide, and will continue to rely heavily on these.During my tenure as editor-in-chief I will endeavour tostrengthen this excellent relationship between IFAC andCEP even further.

Prize paper award

The ‘‘Control Engineering Practice Prize Paper Award’’was awarded to the authors of three papers at the IFAC2005 World Congress in Prague for papers published involumes 10–12 (2002–2004). The CEP community nomi-nated papers for the award and 18 of these met the awardcriteria. The Editors of CEP recommended nine of thesefor consideration by the Control Engineering Practice PrizeAwards Committee consisting of Eduardo Camacho, GuyDumont, Katsuhisa Furuta, Bruce Krogh, Bjorn Witten-mark (chair) and me. Congratulations to the winners:

Bode, C. A., Ko, B. S., & Edgar, T. F. (2004). Run-to-run control and performance monitoring of overlay insemiconductor manufacturing. Control Engineering

Practice, 12, 893–900.Qin, S. J., & Badgwell, T. A. (2003). A survey ofindustrial model predictive control technology. Control

Engineering Practice, 11, 733–764.

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Sawodny, O., Aschemann, H., & Lahres S. (2002). Anautomated gantry crane as a large workspace robot.Control Engineering Practice, 10, 1323–1338.

These are excellent papers and a must-read for anyoneinterested in control applications.

As editor-in-chief I will rely heavily on the manystakeholders of CEP including Elsevier, IFAC, editorsand associate editors, reviewers, authors, readers, as well asthe control community at large. If you have any feedbackor suggestions on what we can do to improve CEP, I shallbe glad to hear from you.

References

Abramovitch, D. Y., & Franklin, G. F. (2004). Fifty years in control: The

story of the IEEE Control Systems Society. IEEE Control Systems

Magazine, 24, 19–36.

Glattfelder, A. H. (2002). Editorial: Message from the new Editor-in-

Chief. Control Engineering Practice, 10, 1165–1167.

Rodd, M. G. (1993). Editorial: Meeting the real needs of the automation

industry. Control Engineering Practice, 1, 1–2.

Ian CraigDepartment of Electrical, Electronic and Computer

Engineering, University of Pretoria, South Africa

E-mail address: cep@up.ac.za.