Editor’s Note

The 8th International Conference on Shock and Impact Loads on Structures (SI09) will take place in Adelaide, Australia, December 2–4, 2009. The conference is organized by the School of Civil, Environmental and Mining Engineering, The University of Adelaide, Australia, with the support of Australia’s Defense Science and Technology Organization (DSTO), and is managed by CI-Premier Conference Organization, Singapore. Inaugurated in 1996 in Singapore, this conference has twice been held in Australia: Melbourne (1997) and Perth (2005). The seventh conference was in Beijing.

The Journal of Performance of Constructed Facilities has been designated the “support journal” for this conference. Authors of some of the papers presented at the conference will be encouraged to prepare related manuscripts for possible publication in a special topic issue of the journal. Dr. Chengqing Wu, chairman of the conference, has agreed to serve as guest editor for the planned special topic issue. Dr. Wu is a frequent reviewer of manuscripts submitted to this Journal on the topics of blast effects on constructed facilities. The conference Web site can be found at http://www.cipremier.com.

The First Congress on Forensic Engineering to be held in Italy, and the Fourth Congress on Collapses, Reliability, and Retrofit of Structures (IF CRASC ’09), are planned in Naples, December 2–4, 2009. Conference languages are Italian and English. While this is the first Italian Forensic Engineering Congress, past CRASC conferences have been held in Venice (2001), Naples (2003), and Messina (2006). The 2009 congress will be hosted by the University of Naples Federico II Department of Structural Engineering. Professor Nicola Augenti is the chairman of the organizing committee. Further information can be found at the Web site at http://www.dist.unina.it/index̱en.htm, or by contacting Professor Augenti at [email protected].

We are pleased to announce a new publication initiative, Civil Engineering Preview. Accepted papers for ASCE journals submitted through Editorial Manager will be posted online in manuscript form before the final, copyedited issue is published online and in print. Early posting of accepted manuscripts reduces time to publication by several months, thereby disseminating the literature as quickly as possible. Each ASCE journal will have a section online devoted to Preview papers, entitled, for example, Performance of Constructed Facilities Preview. Participation by authors is optional.

Civil Engineering Preview papers will be citable. The posted date will appear with the title, and the citation will end with the digital object identifier (DOI) an automatically generated, unique identifier for intellectual property in the digital environment. After a paper is posted online, it will proceed through the copyediting and production process and be published both online and in print. The final version published online will be the version of record. It will bear the original posted date and DOI in addition to the publication volume, issue, and page numbers.

After final publication the manuscript version of a paper will be removed from the active list of Preview papers and stored in an accessible, permanent archive, linked to the final version of the article. Civil Engineering Preview will be functionally integrated into ASCE’s Research Library (http://ascelibrary.org/) and all papers will be searchable. Civil Engineering Preview papers will also be included in the e-mail notification of new papers, which can be requested through the ASCE Research Library’s e-mail alerting system. All papers will be posted within 72 hours of acceptance.

For further information on any of the topics presented here, or to discuss a potential manuscript, please feel free to contact me by mail: Kenneth L. Carper, School of Architecture and Construction Management, College of Engineering and Architecture, P.O. Box 642220, Washington State University, Pullman, Washington 99164-2220; by telephone (509) 335-1229; by fax (509) 335-6132; or by e-mail at [email protected].