β Scribed by George S. Axelby
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
THIS IS THE 100th issue of Automatica which has been published since it became the official IFAC Journal in 1968. Actually, the first issue of this IFAC Journal was not published until January 1969, over 16 years ago. It was also the first issue of Volume 5 rather than Volume 1 because Automatica had been previously published as a Pergamon Press journal having no affiliation with any control society.
In the beginning there was some apprehension concerning Automatica's ability, as the IFAC Journal, to compete with the other control journals which had become well established in the field. However, Automatica was in a position somewhat different from that of the other journals because it represented a truly international organization with technical committees sponsoring large numbers of symposia and workshops in different parts of the world on a wide variety of subjects. Therefore, it seemed that, in addition to publishing unsolicited papers on different aspects of control, Automatica could provide an adequate service to the international control community by publishing revised, expanded versions of some of the outstanding papers presented at IFAC meetings, not only to represent IFAC interests and activities, but also to indicate what developments were being made in countries throughout the world.
Consequently, it was established that the IFAC copyright of papers presented at IFAC meetings would not be released until three months after the IFAC meeting was held--provided that the paper was not being considered for possible publication in Automatica. As a result, the early issues of Automatica contained a large percentage of papers obtained from IFAC meetings along with reports of the meetings, but in subsequent years, more papers were submitted directly for possible publication until, at the present time, the various sources of Automatica papers are distributed as shown in
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