I believe the time is ripe to briefly reflect on my experiences, as Editor of the International Journal of General Systems, since 2002, when Taylor and Francis undertook the publication of the journal. I am pleased to state, without any hesitation, that these experiences have been very positive. My cooperation with the publisher at all levels of management has, over these few years, always been efficient as well as courteous. In particular, I appreciate the successful efforts by Taylor and Francis to sustain timely publication of the journal. While we do not experience any shortage in the supply of good papers, we also do not suffer from large backlogs of papers waiting for production. This absence of a backlog is likely to change at some point in the future, especially with a new section of the journal that is commencing with this issue and which is introduced later in this Editorial. However, when this anticipated change becomes critical, when the number of accepted papers substantially exceeds our capability of publishing them in an orderly fashion, we have the flexibility, fully approved by the publisher, to increase the frequency of our journal and thereby eliminate the backlog.
The primary purpose of this Editorial is to make our readers aware of some changes regarding the journal that commence with this volume. One of them is the appearance of the journal. The journal has now a new cover, and I expect that by now most authors and readers of the journal have already seen it. I believe that the new cover is visually more appealing and, yet, it preserves the basic feature of our previous cover: it conveys the message that complex systems are often conceptualized as collections of interrelated subsystems.
The second, and definitely the most important change, is the addition of a new section in the journal entitled “Intelligent Systems Design.” This section emerged from the former International Journal of Smart Engineering System Design (IJSESD) published by Taylor and Francis. Our purpose in incorporating Smart Engineering into General Systems is to preserve some excellent features of the former journal, which are compatible with the aims of this journal The Editor of this new section is Professor Cihan H. Dagli of University of Missouri-Rolla, who served as Editor-in-Chief of the former journal. Prof. Dagli has responsiblity for the new section, and papers submitted to that section should be sent directly to him.
The section on “Intelligent Systems Design” appears for the first time in this issue. It consists of a short introduction by its Editor, Prof. Dagli, and several excellent papers. In the future, this section might not be represented in each issue due to timing differences in the critiquing of papers. It will be published according to the availability of accepted papers that were specifically submitted to that section. As in this issue, the section will always be clearly identified in the journal.
Associated with the section on “Intelligent Systems Design” are some changes on our Editorial Board. In particular, seven distinguished new members were added to the Board to support this new section. They are: Okan Ersoy (Purdue University), Mark J. Embrechts (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute), David Fogel (Natural Selection, Inc.), Walter Freeman (University of California-Berkeley), David E. Goldberg (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), and Alice Smith (Auburn University).
Finally, I would like to mention one additional change, which is very important for all prospective authors. This is a fundamental change regarding the required style of each manuscript submitted for a publication in the journal. Prior to this volume, we had used our own Notes for Contributors in which the required style was carefully defined. However, this style did not conform to the new style preferred by Taylor and Francis. This has created many difficulties and frustrations. Although each manuscript was carefully checked for stylistic correctness before it was forwarded to the publisher, it happened occasionally that the typesetter ignored the style of the manuscript and typeset the paper in a different style. This resulted in stylistic inconsistencies between some issues of the journal, and sometimes even within the same issue. It seems that these inconsistencies were caused by fairly frequent changes in personnel and imperfect communication during these changes. Regardless of the causes of these stylistic inconsistencies, they are not acceptable and I sincerely apologize for them. To avoid these inconsistencies in the future, I have decided to accept, beginning with this volume, the standard style defined by Taylor and Francis. It is thus important for future authors to consult the Taylor and Francis website for the journal style guide: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals.
George J. Klir
Editor-in-Chief