Dear Arctic, Antarctic, and Alpine Research Readers,

This has been a successful year for the journal. The efforts of many people have combined to make the journal successful. In particular, we take this opportunity to thank the Associate Editors for their service. We also have recruited several new AEs in recent months—Irina Overeem (Delft University of Technology), who specializes in stratigraphy and sedimentology; Glen MacDonald (UCLA), an expert on biogeography and climate change; Jason Box (Ohio State University), who works on polar climatology and surface energy balance; and Scott Armbruster (University of Portsmouth, University of Alaska, and Norwegian University of Science and Technology), whose research interests include pollination and plant reproduction, plant-insect interaction, and insect ecology. We welcome these individuals to the team! (The full list of AEs is on the inside front cover of this issue.) We continue to look for other AEs in the field of vegetation ecology, including studies of patterns of biodiversity and forest and treeline ecology.

We sincerely thank Suzanne Anderson for serving as Editor for the past 2 years. Although Suzanne has enjoyed her job as Editor, she needs to devote more time to teaching and research. Suzanne will join the Associate Editor ranks. Bill Bowman, who has been an Associate Editor for the past 2 years, will join Anne Jennings in the Editor role. Bill will handle the ecologically oriented manuscripts, while Anne will be in charge of the papers dealing with the physical environment and paleoscience.

The transition to an Internet-based manuscript tracking and review system (AllenTrack) has gone very well, and we are pleased to report that the substantial backlog of manuscripts in the review process and in the publication queue has been cleaned up, and the time from submission to appearance in print has decreased tremendously. We received 128 manuscripts in 2006. Over the year, the median time to first decision was 88 days, and the median time to final decision was 109 days. While we do reject a number of manuscripts rapidly as inappropriate for the journal, this does not substantially impact our time to first decision. The bulk of manuscripts have a decision based on review within 3 months. This is facilitated by getting manuscripts to an AE as rapidly as possible, and then, in turn, getting papers out to review quickly. We will continue our efforts to reduce these times.

We continue to strive to improve the standing of AAAR as an academic journal. Although our ISI Impact Factor went down slightly in the past year (from 1.089 for 2004 to 1.045 for 2005), we have maintained a sound position in the middle of our subject categories (76/140 among environmental science journals, and 17/30 among physical geography journals). You can explore these interesting comparisons in the Journal Citation Reports at  http://portal.isiknowledge.com/.

An important piece of the impact factor derives from publishing papers that others want to cite. This means ensuring that the papers we publish have significance to a broad audience, and uphold standards of scientific integrity. We receive almost twice the number of papers that we can potentially publish. We normally publish around 70 papers per year.

We continue efforts to increase the journal’s visibility on the Internet as part of our mandate to disseminate knowledge. All issues from 1969 to 2002 became available online for the first time as part of a journal aggregate available by separate subscription from JSTOR. Our journal also became available starting in 2006 as part of Environment Complete, a specialty online full-text service maintained by EBSCO. We are continuing our association with BioOne as part of the journal aggregate they offer, and we expect to benefit substantially from the strong marketing efforts BioOne is making in Africa and Asia. Starting in 2006, individual subscribers to our journal have online access to all issues since 1969. We also have started working to provide institutional subscribers online access since 2003 as part of their subscription.

Finally, we thank you, our readers, for your sustained interest and financial support, which ultimately makes all of this possible.

Sincerely,

Anne Jennings

Bill Bowman

Suzanne Anderson