Stephen Threlkeld
stt@cedar.olemiss.edu

I have lots of good news to report to you about Estuaries and Coasts. We've had a banner year in 2002, with an all-time record of 1,456 pages published in 125 articles in eight issues. Institutional subscribers now have online access to the journal and we continued to welcome new members, authors and reviewers. We have many new associate editors from around the world and Carlos Duarte has joined us as co-editor in chief with Scott Nixon.

Special Issues of Estuaries and Coasts
Two of the eight issues we published in 2002 were special issues. The first was guest edited by Nancy Rabalais and Scott Nixon and was based on papers presented at an October 2000 symposium on coastal eutrophication at the National Academy of Sciences. At 260 pages it is the largest issue of Estuaries and Coasts ever printed.

The second special issue, guest edited by Paul Montagna, Merryl Alber, and Peter Doering, was based on a symposium on freshwater inflow effects on estuaries held at the ERF 2001 conference in St. Pete Beach, Florida.

Special issues are special to us because they focus attention on current research topics. Because they bring together diverse views on a single topic, that makes them ideal material for graduate readings courses and on your bookshelf if you need a handy reference on that special topic. Not surprisingly they are often the most widely cited issues in the journal.

I am optimistic that the 2002 additions to our inventory of special issues will be read widely and will be important contributions to the literature. If you find yourself wanting extra copies of special issues for class or personal use, please contact me about their purchase.

The year 2003 will be a banner year itself for special issues, too, with three issues scheduled for publication. The first pair of issues, one on multiple stressors in estuarine systems (based on the COASTES project on the Patuxent River estuary) and another on Phragmites, will be published in the spring, and a third comparing estuaries in the Pacific Northwest, will appear just before the ERF conference in Seattle in September.

In 2004, we'll probably publish a special issue from the ERF biennial conference. Proposals for special issues from the Seattle conference will have to be received by June 1, 2003. If you need information about what is involved with a special issue or what is required in a proposal for a special issue, don't hesitate to contact me.

Manuscript Review Times Reduced!
With all this talk about special issues, you might think that regular issues have escaped my attention, but I assure you that nothing could be further from the truth. We've been working hard to significantly reduce the time it takes to get submitted manuscripts through review and into the publication queue.

In the last quarter for which the data are complete (July-September 2002), the average time to reach a first decision is 84 days, and the maximum time has been about 6 months. This success is due in large measure to two important attributes of the people we have contacted about doing reviews for Estuaries and Coasts - they let us know quickly when they are too busy, and they finish the reviews when they've promised to do so. For my New Year's resolution, I am hoping to reduce the average time to communicate our first decision to submitting authors to 60 days and the maximum time to 4 months. Unlike some of my New Year's resolutions (the typical ones about chocolate and exercise), I can be optimistic about this one because the responsiveness of the reviewers and associate editors during the past year has made it possible to propose this goal.

Estuaries and Coasts Online Preprints Available in 2003
With the increasing number of pages being published in Estuaries and Coasts, there's been a significant increase in the number of manuscripts we've received, and an increased number of manuscripts being accepted for publication. The almost inevitable consequence of these increases is that the backlog of accepted manuscripts awaiting publication continues to grow (at about 7 months at the time of this writing).

Beginning in January 2003, we'll be providing online preprints of accepted papers awaiting publication. There will be a monthly e-mail notification to members about the latest papers accepted and available as preprints on the web. The very important pre-publication steps of author review of copyedited manuscripts and preparation of final figures will take place soon after acceptance of manuscripts, so that members will see the final version of a paper when it's posted as an Estuaries and Coasts preprint.

The records of the papers will be included in the database that is searchable at the journal's website. One important addition that we'll make to the printed papers is the date that the paper was first made available as an online preprint so that this fact becomes a part of the publication record (just as important as when a paper was first received, revised or accepted).

Although implementing the process of making the backlog of accepted manuscripts awaiting publication available online will take some additional time, I hope that by the summer of 2003 newly accepted manuscripts will be available online within a couple of weeks of being accepted for publication.