Editorial Board
We are very pleased to announce the addition of a new member to the Editorial Board -- Dr. Robert Rummer of the USDA Forest Service in Auburn, Alabama. Dr. Rummer's work in forest engineering, with a particular emphasis on human factors engineering, will be well known to readers.
Changes from Strategic Plan
In Volume 13(2), I alluded to an ongoing strategic planning process for the IJFE. With the publication of Volume 14, we introduce two of the changes that result from this process: a new cover design and, more importantly, a new online version of the IJFE.
New Cover Design
The new cover design for the IJFE was developed with the objective of more completely portraying the nature of the discipline of forest engineering. The cover is echoed in the web site design for the online version of the IJFE. The new design builds in people, engineering science, forest operations and the international nature of the contributors and readership of the Journal. The silhouette of the softwood tree in the top left corner of the cover is retained from the earlier design.
New Online Version of IJFE
One of the products of the IJFE strategic planning process was the following mission statement:
The International Journal of Forest Engineering's mission is to improve the quality of forest engineering research and practice throughout the world by assisting in the production and wide diffusion of high quality scholarly writings as well as scientific and professional news in forest engineering.
The IJFE is a small circulation journal read largely by an academic research and teaching audience. It has nearly saturated the market of this kind of institution. If we are to achieve the "wide diffusion of high quality scholarly writings" component of the mission, we need also to reach practising forest engineers and foresters as well as individual researchers and their students. Our survey data and market research indicates that to penetrate these markets, we need to do two things: 1) increase the amount of material available in specific topic areas to make subscription worthwhile for individuals who work in particular fields and, 2) reduce the price per page of content. To meet these objectives, the IJFE is launching a new online edition early in 2003.
The online edition will be more than simply a digital version of the paper edition. It adds the following features:
Two subscription models exist in electronic publishing: 1) perpetual access to a single volume of the publication or, 2) limited time access to some or all content. We have adopted the latter approach as this increases the amount of content available on any given topic since papers on that topic can be accessed from all fourteen volumes of the IJFE. The reduced marginal cost of production in creating an online add-on to a paper edition are passed on to online subscribers through an introductory subscription rate of US $40/year. A subscription to the online edition provides access to all online issues (volumes 1-14, as of early 2003) for a limited time of one year.
A second initiative to help increase the impact of the scholarship published in the IJFE, is to have all content older than four years available free online in full text. This means that each year we will add one year to the full text issues available free online. As a result, volumes 1 to 10 will be available online, for free, starting in January 2003.
The online version and information about subscriptions can be accessed through our web site at:
http://www.hil.unb.ca/Texts/JFE/Index.htm
As always, readers comments about these changes are welcome!
Pierre Zundel
Managing Editor