Message from the Outgoing Editor-in-Chief: Farewell Message

I T IS my pleasure to announce that the new Editor-in-Chief (EiC) of our Transactions is Prof. Tzong-Lin Wu. He has already taken brilliantly the office of EiC. In almost last three years, many things have been done to make significant improvements to this Journal. They range from the introduction of regulations that helped to make clear and more transparent the management and actions of all the officials (EiC, AEs, reviewers, etc.), a new definition of the time frame in which all the actions of the review process of a paper should be done, an EMC-oriented taxonomy of the reviewers’ competencies in order to facilitate their proper selection by the Associate Editors. Particular care has been given to the future of the publication by nominating young and competent new AEs that with their fresh energies and relevant scientific skills project the Transactions on the new frontiers of EMC. The T-EMC Advisory Board has been enriched by two members with a strong industrial background in order to offer their experience and views in steering the Transactions toward relevant and real-world topics. The Distinguished Reviewers Award has been continued and a new regulation for the Best Transaction Paper Award has been proposed and approved for a more selective and scientifically consistent choice of the winner. But all these successfully implemented initiatives (that are a part of many others, such as the definitive cleaning of the T-EMC User database, the paginated online publication of the issues with an average of three months in advance with respect to the nominal date, a good number of well-received Special Issues and Sections, the introduction of the category of Review Papers, etc.) converge toward the achievement of a constant increasing trend of the bibliometric figure of merits, such as the impact factor (IF). From the irrelevant IF value of 0.404 in year 2000 to the significant IF of 1.297 at the end of the extraordinary term of