I am very pleased to announce that the new electronic journal Bayesian Analysis, published by the International Society for Bayesian Analysis (ISBA), is taking submissions at http://ba.stat.cmu.edu For a brief description of the journal and its editorial board, see that web page. We are interested in outstanding research and scholarship. Please submit your work!! Some comments follow.
Bayesian Analysis will be published on our web site and will be freely available. It will be dedicated to rapid editorial turnaround of manuscripts, which will be facilitated by (1) a large board of editors and associate editors who will handle most refereeing, and (2) an electronic manuscript-handling system that will greatly reduce the book-keeping overhead for the editorial board. Much effort has gone into creation of the automated manuscript-handling system. Written in PHP/MySQL, it not only enables reviewers to get papers, but also keeps track of all editorial activities and allows instant access to the status and complete history of manuscripts. My hope is that the system will not only reduce the organizational effort required of editors and associate editors but that it will, in addition, relieve the editorial assistant from most of these chores as well (thereby reducing the assistant's job to only a few hours per week, and making the cost of running the journal very small). The system has the following features: Articles are submitted in pdf format and are accessible to relevant referees and editorial board members on the system web site. Articles are tracked by a unique article reference number, and authors may use this number to check on the status of a submitted article. Editors, AEs and referees may view a list of the articles assigned to them, and may then examine the history and current status of any of these articles. Editors have access to an editorial load monitor so that editors and AEs can be picked taking account of load over the past 12 months. The system automatically sends email reminders of response due dates to editors, AEs, and referees. Letters to authors are composed by Editors, checked by the Editor-in-Chief, and sent to authors using the system. They are then archived by the system and are accessible to relevant past and future reviewers. The system allows editors, AEs, and referees to compose messages for other users of the system and archives all such correspondence. This is intended to help with organization of all internal email discussion concerning an article. The system maintains logs of all editorial activities related to each article. The system could not have been constructed without the supervisory advice of our Electronic Production Manager Pantelis Vlachos, the extremely proficient programming of Adrian Rollett, and the miscellaneous help of our very capable editorial assistant Heather Wainer. I am personally grateful to all of them and pleased to acknowledge their work. As you use the system, please don't hesitate to let us know of any comments or suggestions for improvement. I'm excited to be involved in a much-needed vehicle for communication across the ever-widening network of people interested in Bayesian methods. I expect Bayesian Analysis to begin publishing sometime in 2005 and will send an announcement when this occurs. Rob Kass Editor-in-Chief Bayesian Analysis - - To unsubscribe from bayes-news send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with message body: unsubscribe bayes-news or visit http://lib.stat.cmu.edu/cgi-bin/mj_wwwusr