SYSTEM DYNAMICS REVIEW

 

Report of Executive Editor to the Electronic Meeting of Policy Council (Feb 2006)

 

 

1.               Issue 21:4

 

Proofs were checked for this issue some weeks ago. It should be with members before the end of February.  As always, this issue includes the paper from the most recent Jay W Forrester Award winner.

 

            Issue 22:1

 

This issue is filled and copy has been submitted to Wiley. There are four papers including one in the Research Problems section. It is pleasing to note that the winners of the Dana Meadows Award have been able to submit a paper on their work and this has passed the scrutiny of referees and editors. Our editors’ meeting at Boston anticipated that the Dana Meadows Award competition would provide a source of  high quality submissions. One hopes this is the first of many.

 

2.               General Situation

 

The accepted backlog is still almost negligible. There appears to be an increased need for editors to be chasing referees and the consequent delays are impacting on our ability to meet schedule dates put out by Wiley. The normal local workload of my editorial colleagues and myself is substantial and the need to chase referees merely adds to the burden of our roles. The new online submission system (see below) will take away some of the tedious tasks associated with producing each issue but it cannot be over-stressed how important it is for referees to meet their deadlines.

 

3.            Manuscript Central

 

This is Wiley’s on-line system for logging and recording manuscripts and we have now been operating this system for almost one month. Already new submissions are starting to flow, but the first month or two of the year always seems to coincide with  a strong inflow.

 

A particular feature of this online system is in its ability to produce a wealth of detailed statistics on submissions, acceptance rates and so on. Hopefully by the time of the Summer Report to PC we will begin to see the benefits and the statistics will be duly reported.

 

4.         50^th Anniversary Special Issue

 

This will appear, probably in 2007.  There is a need to establish who the Guest Editor(s) shall be, the size and structure of the issue and the criteria for inclusion of papers. For instance a double issue would be possible. This has happened before with the Special Issue on Chaos in 1988.

 

Brian Dangerfield, Executive Editor.  10 February, 2006