From the publisher Reviewer recognition and publisher’s note 2021

As I write these lines, the global pandemic lasts for rather exactly one year. The 7-days-incidence here in Berlin, Germany, has fallen below 100 yesterday, but the lockdown will continue for several weeks at least. Many things have changed in the last 12 months.

The academic world has been shaken in its fundaments. A recent article in the German newspaper FAZ [1] collected voices from universities around the world: In Brazil, a quarter of the students of private universities could not pay for the tuition fees in last April. In Great Britain, more than 50,000 cases of COVID have been reported at universities. Students in Austria have the opportunity to ask for 800 Euro support, if they proof adequate success in their studies. Whatever that means. I could go on, but I think it is quite clear: Students in many countries have limited or no access to regular on-site education. Not to mention student jobs, tuition fees or the situation at home.

Professors had to change to online teaching. Active research had to adopt stringent safety regulations. The academic exchange moved online, which eliminated the opportunity for informal contacts. Most business travel was canceled. While I miss the direct contact with other people very much, the lack of travel has also led to more time for writing.

While so many still suffer from the pandemic and its effects, business has been surprisingly stable over the last 12 months [2]. And governments have installed huge support for their populations. Lots of money go into emergency support of affected businesses, but some resources are devoted to strategic development as well. The German government, for example, has assigned two billion Euro for the funding of quantum computing and related activities in their COVID response future package (“Zukunftspaket”). You may read more about it in the News section of this issue.

Publishing, after all, will make a jump towards the future. Digitization as well as Open Access publishing have accelerated in 2020, which became apparent when the American publishing giant John Wiley & Sons recently acquired Hindawi, an Open Access publisher with a portfolio of 400 peer-reviewed journals. Our publishing partner De Gruyter re-launched its website on February 1st, this should improve the access for AOT readers essentially.

Progress in our journal

For AOT, the effects of the pandemic were small. As most processes are online, they were unaffected. The number of submissions was on the level of previous years. Eighty-four papers have been submitted, 43% of those had to be rejected. If we exclude adjacent papers, such as editorials or news, the rejection rate was severely higher than 50%.

Peer review has been fast again. The average time from submission to a first decision was 15 days for research papers and 25 days for review articles. These numbers include rejected manuscripts, which tend to be much faster. More relevant to authors might be the time from submission to first decision for manuscripts which were not immediately rejected. For research articles this time is about 41 days. The average time for a peer review has been 12 days, which is excellent. This shows that on average, the time to find a reviewer is larger than the actual time to get a report from the reviewer. There is certainly room for improvement on the editorial side. But it should be encountered that it is not wise to invite more than two or three peers at once. The editor has to uninvite them if more than two peers accepted the invitation to review, which leads to an unwanted disappointment in the reviewer community.

Beside the question how fast their paper is processed, authors are interested in the visibility of their paper. According to worldcat.com, Advanced Optical technologies is now available in more than 200 libraries worldwide. The citation index for papers published in this journal has also increased. The Scopus CiteScore was 2.5 in 2019, for 2020 we expect 2.9 or better. The CiteScore refers to publications of the last 4 years including the year to which the number refers. In other words, for the CiteScore 2020, The number of citations from 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020 is divided by the cumulative number of publications in these years. It takes a longer period into account compared to the Clarivate impact factor, and it includes citations in the year when the paper was published. While the initial goal of AOT was set to one citation per paper, the recent development towards three represents a good value for a journal with applied research and rarely cited industry publications.

Recognition of 2020 reviewers in advanced optical technologies

The development of a higher citation rate can be directly connected to an improvement in the quality of the papers. Which is depending on the level of submitted papers as well as the quality of peer review reports. About 1% of the submitted research and review papers is accepted without a revision. So most submissions need a revision. Which is not a bad thing, as the detailed comments of two independent experts usually improve the quality of the paper.

But such an improvement depends on the voluntary contribution of a large number of peers. These people made the ongoing success of AOT possible. I would like to express my cordial gratitude to all of them! In the following, you may find a list of reviewer names who did their careful job for AOT authors in 2020:

Banerji, Sourangsu,

Bason, Mark,

Bauemer, Stefan

Bokor, Nandor

Bonse, Jörn

Böntgen, Tammo

Borna, Amir

Brunner, Robert

Chassagne, Luc

Chen, Dihan

Daquan Yang, Daquan Yang

Duerr, Fabian

Dumas, Virginie

Ebendorff-Heidepriem, Heike

Esmail, Mohamed Saleh

Garcia-Escartin, Juan Carlos

Gross, Herbert

Häusler, Gerd

Hennessy, John

Herrmann, Sven

Hobson, Richard

Holloway, Christopher

Huang, Lei

Huntemann, Nils

Ingleby, Stuart

Islam, Md. Saiful

Jensen, Kasper

Juodkazis, Saulius

Kalenbaek, Rainer

Kane, Timothy

Karlsson, Mikael

Khanh, Tran

Kim, Young-Sik

Kirchner, Robert

Kitching, John

Knöchelmann, Marvin

Kononenko, Taras

Lachmayer, Roland

Ma, Xiongfeng

Meyer, Jörg

Moita, Ana

Mulko, Lucinda

Müller, Jörg

Munechika, Keiko

Nie, Yunfeng

nOlyaee, Saeed

Passerat de Silans, Thierry

Peters, Nicholas

Rebollar, Esther

Reyes Vera, Erick

Ristau, Detlev

Rommel, Mathias

Roth, Bernhard

Saito, Yoshihiko

Salvadori, Giacomo

Schlippert, Dennis

Scholtes, Theo

Senger, Frank

Song, Zhenfei

Stebila, Douglas

Stefani, Oliver

Stratakis, Emmanuel

Verschuuren, Marcus Antonius

Wu, Shin-Tson

Wu, Xuejian

Yang, Shuming

Yannis, George

Zaytsev, Kirill

Outlook 2021

After some nice issues on topics such as applied quantum sensing or new trends in automotive lighting in recent issues there is a list of ambitious topics planned for 2021. First we will see an issue on “High-Rate Laser Processing” while later in the year “Smartphone optics & applications” are planned as well as “Lasers in Ophthalmology”. Further topics are in preparation, but all interested researchers are invited to submit papers or ideas for new topical issues. Suggestions can be send to me (th@thoss-media.de) or to the Editor-in-Chief Michael Pfeffer (Michael.pfeffer@hs-weingarten.de).

Last but not least I would like to use this occasion to thank the members of the Editorial Board and the Editor-in-Chief of AOT for their ongoing support. It was a pleasure to work with you in 2020 and I am looking very much forward to meeting you in person again. While this was only rarely possible last year, I hope very much for a bigger meeting of the Editorial Board at the Laser World of Photonics trade fair in Munich. A nice summer evening in a shallow Biergarten in Munich would be a great place to celebrate the victory over the pandemic.

Yours sincerely,

Andreas Thoss Publisher Advanced Optical Technologies