Special Issue on Performance of Timber and Hybrid Structures

ASCE’s Technical Council on Forensic Engineering (TCFE) is planning the Seventh Forensic Engineering Congress, to be held in New York City in the fall of 2015. Watch for further details. By the time this issue is published, the congress website will have been established, including a call for papers, final dates, and specific venue. Forensic engineering congresses are held every three years. Previous congresses were in Minneapolis, Minnesota (1997); San Juan, Puerto Rico (2000); San Diego, California (2003); Cleveland, Ohio (2006); Washington, DC (2009); and San Francisco, California (2012). The ASCE Forensic Engineering Congress represents the premier U.S. opportunity for learning about advances in the forensic engineering discipline. For more information regarding the congresses, please see the Editor’s Note reviewing the 2012 Forensic Engineering Congress in the March/April 2013 issue of the Journal (Vol. 27, No. 2, pp. 133–134).

The International Association of Protective Structures (IAPS) will sponsor the Third International Conference on Protective Structures (ICPS3) in Newcastle, Australia, on February 3–6, 2015. Hosted by the Centre for Infrastructure Performance and Reliability, the conference will focus on protection of engineering infrastructure against natural and human-caused explosion and impact actions. Further information can be found at www.icps3.c2im.org.au.

The IF CRASC’15 Congress, hosted by the Italian Association of Forensic Engineering, will be held in Rome, Italy, on May 14–16, 2015. This will be the Third Congress on Forensic Engineering in conjunction with the Sixth Congress on Collapses, Reliability and Retrofit of Structures to take place in Italy. English and Italian are the official languages. Further information is available at www.aifitalia.it/ifcrasc15/ifcrasc15english.html.

The next Shock and Impact Loads on Structures Conference (SI15) is planned to take place in Ottawa, Canada, on May 13–15, 2015. Professor Murat Saatcioglu is chairman for the conference. The official announcement and conference website are in preparation at the time of this writing.

Some important changes to ASCE journals publication policies have recently been announced. The ASCE journals program has adopted a single-article publishing model called Just Released. Once accepted, a paper receives a production check within a few days, and after any outstanding author queries are resolved, the paper is sent for copyediting and typesetting. Page proofs go out to authors within six to seven weeks of acceptance. If page proofs are returned within 48 h, the paper is published online in final form within 10–12 weeks of acceptance. No additional changes are accepted once the Just Released article has been published online. These articles are fully accessible and citable, just as if they had appeared in print. This is a major improvement over the previous “post ahead of print” model, in which accepted article drafts were posted in unedited form. The end result of this change is that final articles are now available much sooner.

Print issues are now assembled in a dynamic process that no longer allows the editor to organize papers in an issue logically; they are instead published and organized in the order of acceptance. Special topic issues (such as this one) and special sections within issues are exceptions in that a select group of papers can be collected by the editor to be published together. However, even in a special topic issue, the order of papers is no longer in a logical sequence. Instead, papers appear in their order of acceptance. Thus, the Introduction written by the guest editor may not follow the actual order of papers within the issue. This disadvantage, and any confusion that results, should be outweighed by the many advantages to the new Just Released publication model.

I welcome your comments and questions regarding potential manuscript submissions. I am always looking for volunteers to assist with manuscript reviews. Please feel free to contact me ([email protected]) at any time.