Letter from the Editors

It is a great honour for us to be able to announce this issue of NJAS—Wageningen Journal of Life Sciences. It marks a new era for the journal, for its authors and readers, and for us editors. After a long period of preparation and making use of the opportunity of preparing a special issue on crop modelling it has been possible to make – in close collaboration with Elsevier – a big step forwards in technical terms. The whole process of manuscript submission, manuscript reviewing, editing, publication and dissemination has become electronic. NJAS—Wageningen Journal of Life Sciences is now available online as an Elsevier journal but it is also still available as a printed copy. We are convinced that we are in good hands with Elsevier, one of the largest scientific publishers in the world. Elsevier publishes many journals, and many of them in collaboration with or on behalf of scientific or professional societies such as KLV (Wageningen Alumni Network, formerly known as the Royal Netherlands Society for Agricultural Sciences).

With this important step we hope to realize several goals at the same time:

1.	NJAS—Wageningen Journal of Life Sciences has always been an international journal with a strong link to Wageningen. We have now opened up by globalizing our network of associate editors, authors, reviewers and readers. We have become global without disavowing our roots in Wageningen.

2.	We can now offer faster publication of manuscripts offered, easy access online and a streamlined process of submitting and publishing without the delays and costs associated with hard copies and forwarding.

3.	We can now make use of the service offered by Elsevier and all the benefits it brings to the authors, readers, reviewers and editors. For example, authors can now easily track the progress of their manuscripts.

4.	We also hope that this step will provide a larger impact of the journal and of the individual papers published therein.

Some things will not change. We will remain a multidisciplinary journal covering the fields of plant sciences, animal sciences, environmental sciences, social sciences and food sciences, with a focus on system approaches. And we will be loyal to our objective to offer a much needed platform for interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research, as defined several years ago [1]. Although in the first 49 issues mainly a journal for plant and animal sciences [2], the decision to widen the scope, taken in 2002, has made the journal broader and has brought it more in line with the readership it was aiming for as a general scientific journal for the alumni network of Wageningen University. The many highly appreciated and well read special issues on various aspects of agricultural sciences are proof of the success of that approach.

The new era starts with a special issue on crop modelling. In two ways this is symbolic: Wageningen has been a centre of excellence in this field since the 1960s. And crop modelling has become a very important and diverse field with many important players spread all over the world. That diversity in focus and origin is perfectly reflected in this special issue. We wish you interesting and good reading.