Abstract
Dear Reader,
During the past year European Journal of Physics gained the subtitle `The European voice of physics teachers in higher education'. I believe that this subtitle will be of great value in giving the right impression of the journal. The subtitle will very clearly inform readers and future authors that the journal is not intended for basic research articles but scholarly studies of interest to physics teachers in university education.
Some examples of papers recently published in the journal can be observed from the electronic journal's home page on the IOPP WWW server (http://www.iop.org); these articles will be updated approximately every three months.
An analysis of submissions to European Journal of Physics indicates that an average of around 20 papers and 2 or 3 communications (short items) are received every month, while the acceptance rate is reasonably constant at about one third of this. High proportions of articles received during 1995 originated from the USA, South America and Spain, but acceptances were more widely spread. The subtitle of the journal and the examples of good papers freely available electronically on the IOPP WWW server will, we hope, be of great assistance in improving the acceptance rate of papers of interest to teachers in physics higher education.
In the Editorial at the start of 1996 I gave details of the intention of the Editorial Board to produce a special issue on the theme of the centenary of the discovery of the electron. However, we have discovered that it can be difficult to find authors for enough papers to fill a whole issue on one topic, so the special papers will appear as a feature in a regular journal issue in 1997 instead. The idea of publishing special issues will not be lost, however, and many new proposals have been put forward:
the acoustics of musical instruments (perhaps in the form of `mini-reviews' of different instruments),
astronomy education,
explanations of complicated physics issues (advanced topics in four-year courses),
large scale quantum effects,
melting, both in the context of liquids and of solids,
neural networks,
solid state physics, especially of semiconductors,
unresolved problems in physics (such as were outlined in Physics World September 1996).
The refereeing process for the journal is very important and all members of the Editorial Board are involved. Due to the limited resources available for rewriting articles submitted in poor English, we must ask all our authors to have their papers checked thoroughly before despatching them to the Editorial Office. Articles should additionally fulfil the requirements laid down by the journal's subtitle, and should not contain too specialized a content or be uninteresting. However, papers dealing in a more general way with new research may be accepted if the physics involved has already been accepted by the physics community.
We look forward to receiving your contributions to the journal in the coming months, therefore.
With best wishes
Lennart Samuelsson