Message From the Outgoing Editor-in-Chief
M Y three-year term as the Editor-in-Chief (EIC) of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SIGNAL PROCESSING (TSP) will end on December 31, 2011. It has been a tremendous honor for me to serve the IEEE Signal Processing Society in that capacity and to interact with many brilliant Editorial Board members and authors. I was very pleased to see that Dr. Zhi-Quan (Tom) Luo of the University of Minnesota has been appointed to be my successor. Dr. Luo is a highly accomplished researcher in the area of signal processing, and I am confident that he will serve the journal well. The IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SIGNAL PROCESSING is the premier publishing venue in the area of signal processing. For three years in a row, it has been the IEEE journal that has received the highest number of submissions. In 2009, we received 1594 new submissions, 17% more than in 2008. This submission volume put a strain on the Editorial Board of 70 Associate Editors (AEs), as they were given the task of peer reviewing nearly every paper while still remaining selective with their reviewer choices. In order to make the best use of editorial and reviewer resources, we established a new review model that calls for a two-tier review process. According to that model, all submitted manuscripts are prescreened according to IEEE guidelines to determine whether they are comprehensible, fall within the scope of the periodical, and meet a minimum criterion for technical substance. Only the manuscripts that meet these criteria are sent to peer review. This prescreening process is coordinated by eight members of the Editorial Board, called Area Editors, and is conducted within the Editorial Board. Papers that do not successfully pass the prescreening processes are immediately rejected by the EIC on the recommendation of the Area Editor. The rest of the papers are assigned to AEs based on EDICS and AE availability. This new model, now in its second year, sends to peer review only the best two thirds of the submitted papers, thus reducing the number of needed reviews in 2010 by 1125. It also significantly reduced the AEs’ workload and afforded them the time to pay closer attention to the papers that they handled. Meeting our goals, the paper processing time has been significantly shortened. Upon acceptance, a paper is pre-posted on IEEE Xplore immediately. The average time from submission