A Message From the Outgoing Editor-in-Chief

A FTER three years as Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SIGNAL PROCESSING, it is time to hand it over, and I am glad to announce that Prof. Athina Petropulu has been found willing to take the helm. Athina is, of course, no stranger to the IEEE Signal Processing Society, having organized ICASSP 2005 in Philadelphia, PA, and acted as the Vice-President of Conferences from 2006 to 2008. I am confident that she will do a great job, even if the job will turn out to be very demanding! The IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SIGNAL PROCESSING is now an unusually large publication. This was already remarked upon by the former Editor-in-Chief Arye Nehorai (in 2002), and the numbers have only been growing. Among all IEEE journals, there are only a few that publish more articles. We receive over 110 new submissions per month, whereas this was about 75 in 2002 and 85 in 2005. Part of these pages have been used to significantly reduce the queue of accepted papers waiting to be printed. Currently an accepted paper should go to Production almost immediately. The healthy financial situation of the Society has made this possible. Large numbers of submissions have important consequences: All of these additional papers need to be reviewed! Associate Editors are crucial in managing the review cycle. Although the number of Associate Editors has remained constant (about 60), the average time from submission to final decision has been shrinking (now less than five months); i.e., more work is being done in less time. I have been very fortunate to find such a dedicated team of volunteers, and lots of credits go to them. I also wish to acknowledge the outstanding professional help of our manuscript coordinators at the IEEE Signal Processing Society's office in Piscataway, NJ (Kevin Uherek, followed by Ziggy Kowalski), as well as of our IEEE Staff Production Editor (Christine Vartanian). They really provide extraordinary service. To keep the reviewer efforts within limits, we have started to be more selective before sending out papers for review. In particular, we pay more attention to our scope and only consider papers for which the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SIGNAL PROCESSING is the most suitable IEEE publication venue. We also make a first screening on quality and reject obviously poor papers without reviews, provided two associate editors agree on this. Overall, about 8% of papers are now rejected without reviews , …