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Letter to Area Editors, February 6 Dear Area Editors: I am thrilled to have been able to assemble such a distinguished group of experts to integrate the Review Board of the IEEE Reviews in Biomedical Engineering. The list of Area Editors is here. This website is still under construction, as is the submission process in Manuscript Central. You will be informed when they are fully operational. At this time, I would like to remind you that each year IEEE R-BME will have a section entitled, "In the Spotlight" which will feature a review of the most salient advances in one of the areas of biomedical engineering. These reviews are your responsibility as Area Editors, and are limited to three published pages. This feature article should be completed by September and uploaded to Manuscript Central. I have utilized the themes of the IEEE EMBS annual conference to provide the scope for each area. This was one suggestion for a source of information that would allow you to outline the exactly the trends you spotted in the EMBS, but you are free to use your own methods and of course your expertise. I am also interested in using In the Spotlight as a mechanism to break the static nature of journals, and would like to have your input on this. Now that we have the web, we can indeed allow readers to shape what appears in each of the In the Spotlight columns by creating a blog for each theme and allowing readers to let us know what they think are the most salient advances in each theme. I will ask Hans van Oostrom to help with this, but I think it is a worthwhile initiative and would like to get your feedback on this idea. Of course what effectively gets published from these yearly discussions in the blog will be entirely of your choosing. For now, consider this an idea "under construction." If we agree, it will be implemented in 2009. Finally, the role of the Area Editors is also to help the EiC seek top quality authors to submit manuscripts and review the submitted papers. Again, this is only going to happen in 2009, since the inaugural issue will include only invited contributions. You have received the tentative list of topics and authors for the inaugural issue. I do not expect to receive initially more than 20 submissions a year, which will be about 2-3 papers per year for which you will need to coordinate the review. Therefore, this is far less busy than TBME, although each manuscript, by its very nature, is a more difficult paper to review and may require a more direct intervention of the Area Editor. Please share with me your ideas of possible topics and authors to invite for 2009. Please provide feedback to this letter, and thanks again for agreeing to be a part of one more adventure. All the best, Jose C. Principe, Editor in Chief |