Foreword

We announce a significant change in the original concept profile of our “News Forum”.  Beginning with this issue, we may occasionally pre-publish strictly limited selections of papers submitted to certain major conferences in superconductivity, provided the conference and the publisher of its papers expressly agree to it.  In each such case, a separate announcement (approved by that conference) is to be made by the Forum - with the submission rules specified. 

Selected papers will be pre-published as received, without any editorial changes.  Therefore, the Forum will be serving only as a (possibly temporary) electronic archive of preprints.  The layout and all instructions of the conference publisher will apply and must be adhered to.  The conference template should be used, per conference rules.  Obviously, the conference publisher will retain the exclusive copyright. Immediately after the appearance of the (usually peer-reviewed) final version of a conference paper online or in print, the version pre-published in the “Forum might be replaced either by the final, peer-refereed and published version of that paper (if the conference publisher permits this) or by a link to the free abstract of the final publication.  In some cases authors might decide which alternative they prefer.

The pre-publication of a small fraction of ASC 2008 papers is the first test of our new policy.  Selected from ASC preprints submitted to us prior to the peer-review are those, which meet the following criteria:

• Topical correctness, absence of obvious errors,
• Originality, novelty, importance and timeliness,
• Satisfactory English language,
• Adherence to all formal rules stipulated in the ASC 2008 template text.

We received 104 preprints, which have been evaluated and rated by a panel of over 30 anonymous reviewers, not necessarily identical with those performing the peer review for IEEE Transaction on Applied Superconductivity, the publisher of ASC 2008 papers.  While some reviews are still pending, the reviewers already rated favorably nearly 50% of the total number of preprints submitted.  These favorably rated obviously deserve prompt pre-publication.  In this situation, we decided to publish in October a Special Issue of the “News Forum” (No. 6) devoted exclusively to ASC papers.  We present it now to our readers.  The papers included were evaluated and selected by October 20th¹.  Regular “Forum” papers and the remaining ASC papers selected (or to be selected) for pre-publication are deferred to the following regular Issue 7 (January 2009).  A partial preview of that issue will be made available already in November 2008.

In addition to introducing this Special ASC Issue of our “Forum”, we also wish to announce that Prof. Herbert C. Freyhardt (HCF) recently agreed to become our Co-editor representing ESAS.  Effective immediately, areas of his topical responsibility are  Materials and Conductors (“Forum” Categories 2, 3 and 5).  Alex I. Braginski (AIB) is now solely responsible for Category 4 (Superconducting Electronics).  The remaining Categories are the joint responsibility of both Co-editors, while AIB is the current Editor-in-Chief.  Rosemary Tennis remains the Webmaster. HCF’s joining our team should significantly strengthen the “News Forum”.  Welcome aboard!

Go to Issue #6 - ASC 2008 Special Issue

ASC 2008 Papers Not Included in Special Issue No. 6