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Thank You for Your Continued Support

The January issue is both a time for looking forward and for reflecting on past accomplishments. Each year, we offer our heartfelt thanks to the hundreds of volunteer peer reviewers who help ensure the quality and integrity of the Journal of the Air & Waste Management Association. We could not be successful in our jobs as editors without their continued dedication and commitment to the scientific community. And so in keeping with the Journal’s longstanding tradition, this issue is dedicated to the hundreds of qualified professionals who help us decide which manuscripts to publish each year.

As editors, we are constantly seeking new authors to take advantage of the Journal’s diverse, sophisticated, and expert readership as a platform for communication of their research results. The Journal’s latest Impact Factor—a measure of the frequency with which journal papers have been cited within a given period of time—is 2.02. This is a strong indication of the quality of the papers published in the Journal and is due, in large part, to the hard work of our reviewers. Click here for a list of the reviewers who contributed to the Journal in 2009. We thank all of you who have donated your time and effort to this cause, and look forward to adding to this list next year. (Anyone wishing to join this esteemed group of volunteer reviewers should contact us directly.)

In addition to the critical efforts of our peer reviewers, we are fortunate to be able to rely upon an eminently qualified and dedicated group of Associate Editors. The Associate Editors play a crucial role in the day-to-day operations of the Journal. Their breadth of expertise gives us more complete coverage in the science of air and waste management, and brings new diligence to the manuscript review and selection process. The Associate Editors are also key representatives of the Journal in their countries and disciplines, seeking out new topics of interest and potential special issues. The Journal’s Associate Editors are listed at the front of each month’s issue.

It’s worth noting that, with the help of our reviewers and editors, we published 136 technical papers in 2009, covering a range of interesting research topics in the areas of air quality and hazardous waste management, including the 2009 Critical Review, “Remote Sensing of Particulate Pollution from Space: Have We Reached the Promised Land?,” by Raymond Hoff and Sundar Christopher. This review provides an important discussion of the increasing quality of pollution relevant remote sensing observations, and the community interest in them. The Journal continues to be a unique source of knowledge about pollution issues, ranging from instrumentation, and emissions to ambient environmental quality and its effects on humans and ecosystems.

Now, as we look forward to the coming year, there are some exciting opportunities and challenges ahead. Perhaps most critical is the need to urge authors to aggressively submit their research for publication in the Journal. It is common knowledge that financial support for air quality and waste management research has declined significantly in recent years. Despite this, many unresolved environmental problems remain and researchers continue to find resources to analyze and interpret results. We “challenge” everyone to continue your research efforts in these difficult economic times and submit your work to the Journal for communication to the scientific community.

Another issue we’ll be tackling in the near future is open access, the growing movement toward making research articles freely available online. While most of us in the research and academic community agree in principle with the concept, there are myriad concerns, including the Association’s budgetary needs, that need to be taken into account before a decision can be made. We are confident there is a middle ground and that we will have some news on the open access front later this year. If you have any thoughts on this issue, please let us know. We’d appreciate hearing your perspective.
 

Tim Keener                                                                                 George Hidy
Technical Editor-in-Chief                                                         Co-Editor                  

Journal Editors:  

Tim Keener [bio]	George Hidy [bio]

Tim Keener                                                                    George Hidy
Technical Editor-in-Chief                                            Co-Editor
Professor, Civil & Environmental Engineering       Envair/Aerochem
University of Cincinnati