Editorial

Our goal at TOG is to get excellent papers out to the graphics community as rapidly as possible. This year we modified the SIGGRAPH and TOG papers refereeing and publication process to get more of these papers to the community faster than before possible. Ordinarily, the SIGGRAPH papers committee accepts papers either " as-is " or " with minor revisions, " in fact, so minor that the revisions can be reasonably performed in a couple weeks. All other papers would ordinarily be rejected by SIGGRAPH and some of the best of these might then be revised and resubmitted to the following year's SIGGRAPH, even if the revisions only took a month to perform. Furthermore, there would be no guarantee that a revised SIGGRAPH submission would be reviewed by the original SIGGRAPH referees. Nor is there a guarantee that if all of the previous reviewers' concerns were addressed, that the paper would be accepted, and one could possibly get in return a whole new set of completely different concerns. This year, with the help of the SIGGRAPH 2004 Papers Chair Joe Marks and with logistical support from Papers Coordinator Janet McAndless, we established a modified refereeing pipeline that enables the SIGGRAPH Papers Committee to accept some papers " with major revisions " to appear in a subsequent issue of TOG. I am very pleased to announce that this issue contains the first of these: " Variational Normal Meshes " by Ilja Friedel, Peter Schroeder, and Andrei Khodakovsky. This paper (and the others in its category) would likely have been accepted by next year's SIGGRAPH papers committee and appear in next July's SIGGRAPH issue, but because of this pipeline, we are able to publish it nine months earlier than SIGGRAPH ordinarily would. Other such papers are in our pipeline and will appear in the next few issues alongside TOG's usual mix of excellent papers submitted and refereed throughout the year. I also look forward to working with SIGGRAPH 2005's Papers Chair Markus Gross on further streamlining this process and getting more of these good ideas out to you as fast as we can.