This special issue presents highlights from ECCE 2018, the 30th European Conference on Cognitive Ergonomics, which is the annual event of the European Association of Cognitive Ergonomics (EACE). ECCE is a leading and historical conference on human-media interaction and cognitive engineering.
Running this special issue is an important milestone for the BIT journal. For the first time, we have aligned the review process with that of a conference to allow publication of top-rated papers directly in the journal and during the conference.
This ‘journal-first’ publication introduces a new for BIT way of cooperating with well-established conferences. It comes as a response to recent trends that blur the boundaries between publishing in journals and publishing in conferences. Such blurring has become necessary as it allows to combine the speed of publication in conferences with the impact and quality assurance of a journal. Especially for a multi-disciplinary fields like Cognitive Ergonomics and Human-Computer Interaction where different research communities value journals and conferences quite differently, we hope that this alignment of strategies of journals and conference has a lot to offer. It is our plan for BIT to repeat and extend this approach to a number of other conferences fitting the aims and scope of the journal, and which will allow it to track new developments in this field.
This special issue with highlights from ECCE 2018 presents a selection of 5 top-rated papers from the conference who were invited to submit revised manuscripts to the journal. The conference reviewers provided recommendations for improvement which have been followed up by the special issue editors.