I have just completed my second year as Editor of The Canadian Journal of Chemical Engineering. After a very difficult 1998 Winter, the editorial office in Montreal has caught up with most of the back load and the operation is now almost under steady state. In 1998, the issues of the Journal appeared with unacceptable delay. This is largely due to problems encountered here with a long strike and the publication of a very large special issue on Mixing in June. We had considerable success and decided to accept major contributions at the last minute. The Mixing Issue contained 352 pages and this success is largely due to Professors Tanguy (Ecole Polytechnique of Montreal) and Nienow (The University of Birmingham) who as coordinators spared no efforts to obtain contributions from renown authors. The December issue was partly devoted to articles which were presented in a symposium on Electrochemical Applications in Montreal in 1997. This issue included eight French articles and one English article in the area, and Professor Savadogo (Ecole Polytechnique of Montreal) was the Guest Editor. The Journal will keep publishing special or thematic issues, at a pace of at least one per year. These special issues, I believe, give the Journal more visibility and focus on the challenges of the Chemical Engineering discipline. Nevertheless, I am committed to bring the Journal publication under schedule.
Professor Robert Legros, of the Chemical Engineering Department at Ecole Polytechnique, has accepted to act as Associate Editor. In that capacity, both Dr. Rajinder Pal, of the University of Waterloo, and Professor Legros will second me for editorial decisions and copy-editing of an increasing number of articles. These jobs done part-time, while trying to maintain regular professorial duties, are most demanding and challenging. I am very grateful to Robert and Rajinder for their immense help.
We will keep up with the Journal policy on quality. For that we have to rely on you, as reviewers, to ensure that only significant articles are published. We are grateful to some of you, renowned experts in specific fields, who faithfully return, at our request, their reviews. We make all efforts to reduce the demand on you and expand our bank of reviewers. We need your input and urge you to communicate to us names of potential reviewers. I am specifically thinking of recent Ph.D. graduates, who are willing to serve as reviewers and usually do highly thorough reviews.