Journal of Materials Processing Tech.

251 (2018) 387–388

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Journal of Materials Processing Tech.

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jmatprotec

Editorial

The Journal of Materials Processing Technology 2007-17 MARK

At the end of our decade as curators of the Journal of Materials Processing Technology, we wanted to use this editorial to reflect on what we have
learnt as joint Editors-in-Chief.
The Journal of Mechanical Working Technology was founded in 1977 by Professor Frank Travis of Strathclyde University, to provide “within the
field of mechanical working, an area of common ground for academics and industrialists, to better allow the results of the work of the former to be
put to the service of the latter, and so that current industrial problems can be clearly identified” (Travis, 1977). In its first year, the journal published
20 original research articles and one review paper and the journal grew steadily. Professor Travis managed a careful process of reviewing to attract
and ensure the quality and value of articles published in the journal under his name. By 1989, the journal was publishing 88 articles in one year, but
Travis recognised that his original choice of title had become limiting: the phrase “mechanical working” was not universally understood and he
wanted to expand the scope to include materials other than metal (Travis, 1990). Under its new name, the Journal of Materials Processing Tech-
nology continued from 1990 with Travis as editor. However the new scope and the decision to allow publication of conference proceedings within
the journal led to a great expansion in submissions: 454 papers were published in 1995, rising to 490 in 2000. To cope with the resulting expansion of
editorial effort, Travis (2005) appointed three regional editors and on his retirement in 2000, handed over the editorship to Professor Hashmi.
During Professor Hashmi’s time, the era of electronic publishing was launched and with the relative ease of submission, the journal experienced a
further rapid growth in submissions. This was extremely challenging to the editorial practices of the previous paper-based system, which was soon
overwhelmed.
When we were appointed as joint Editors-in-Chief in 2007, we found the journal had a backlog of accepted papers so large that it would take until
early 2009 to package and print them all in issues of the journal. With the enormous volume of submissions, some papers were being handled by
journal administrators who had no detailed understanding of the subject. Not surprisingly, author satisfaction with this great journal was at an all
time low − with authors complaining, rightly, about long delays, poor quality reviewing, and unexplained decisions.
We therefore began our time at the journal with the brief to raise its quality and in our first two years took a series of decisions aiming solely to do
this:

• We re-wrote the aims and scope of the journal, to clarify its precise interests, and to encourage authors of articles more suitable to other journals
(particularly those related to materials science, surface science, ceramics, polymers and production systems) to re-direct their submissions. We
also excluded conference proceedings from the journal, in recognition of the different role and expectations of conference publications in our
subject area.
• We changed from Travis’ system of regional editors to subject area editors.
• We refreshed the Editorial Board with a panel of world-leading experts who shared with us a dedication to the quality of the journal.
• We wrote a detailed guide to writing a good paper for the journal, and throughout our 10 years in charge, one of us has pre-read every article
submitted to the journal to ensure that it falls within scope, meets our specification for a good paper, and contains a significant new contribution
to transferable knowledge (Allwood and Tekkaya, 2009).
• We have refined every part of the journal’s operating practices to increase the speed of decision making.
• We have written an annual editorial with recommendations for good practice in authoring (Allwood and Tekkaya, 2012, 2016) and reviewing
papers (Allwood and Tekkaya, 2015) and run several seminars for authors and reviewers around the world, to promote good practice.

The response to these decisions taken early in our tenure and applied consistently since has been a steady improvement in the obvious metrics
applied to the journal: the Impact Factor has risen from 0.60 to 3.15; the average time taken from paper submission to a final decision has dropped
from 23 weeks in 2007 to about 6 weeks; all metrics of author satisfaction have shifted from the strong negatives we inherited to strong positives; the
number of articles per year downloaded from the journal has doubled to nearly two million.
The result of these externally visible metrics has been to encourage more submissions: the year we started, the journal received around 800 new
submissions but in 2017, the total will approach 4000. This extraordinary growth reflects increasing interest in manufacturing technology in rapidly
developing economies, particularly China, and a shift in author preferences to send their best work to this journal rather than one of its competitors.
Nevertheless, looking on the shelves where we keep our archive of the journal, we can see that the total number of pages printed in the journal was
slightly smaller in 2016 than when it was most out of control in 2008. During 2017 we conducted some analysis on our editorial choices, and found
that we reject around 20% of all submissions because they are out of scope, fit other journals better, or contain too much text copied from previous

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jmatprotec.2017.09.009

Available online 07 September 2017

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Editorial Journal of Materials Processing Tech. 251 (2018) 387–388

publications. We send about 30% of all submissions back to their authors specifying improvements required before we will agree to send them onto
our faithful reviewers. Most of our recommendations relate to points covered in our “Guide for Authors” which authors have ignored, or to the need
for better coverage of previous literature to confirm the novelty of their new work. The remaining 50% of papers are sent out for review and, on the
recommendations of our excellent reviewers, just under half of these are eventually accepted following revision. These statistics are, to us, those of a
healthy journal aiming at high quality publications. We do not want to waste our reviewers’ valuable time with sub-standard papers, and nor do we
wish to consider papers on topics where other journals have developed a better pool of reviewer expertise.
Achieving this approach to quality depends on the hard work and good will of the community around the journal, and we want to express our
warm thanks to them. In particular:

• We wish to thank our high-level Editorial Board for their useful suggestions about raising the quality of the journal, and the importance of
imposing high standards.
• We are extremely grateful to our huge panel of expert reviewers, many of whom have performed an unreasonable number of reviews in response
to our requests. So many people have helped it seems invidious to identify any individuals, but we wish to express our personal appreciation to
Professors P. A. F. Martins, M. Merklein and H. Utsunomiya, who have performed the largest number of reviews during our tenure, and whose
judgement and recommendations we have come to trust absolutely.
• We have been privileged to work with Professors C. H. Caceres, T.H.C. Childs and his successor V. Schulze, and Jing-Feng Li and his successor G.
Cheng, as our subject editors. All have worked tirelessly, but the longest serving of them, Professor Caceres, has also handled the largest number
of papers. He has done this with a generous tutorial concern to help authors improve their work that we have both found truly inspiring.
• We are extremely grateful to the authors of our best papers, for entrusting their new insights to us.

Our decade of work as joint Editors-in-Chief has been a wonderful period of collaboration. Sharing the work equally between two of us, we have been able
to confirm and discuss every choice we have faced in aiming to raise the quality of the journal. But with five times more submissions than when we started,
the journal now needs a new editorial structure and it is a good time for us to hand over. While we were completing this editorial, we heard that Professor Jian
Cao has been appointed as the next Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Materials Processing Technology and is working on a new editorial structure with a
greatly expanded team of editors. We are delighted she has agreed to take on this important task and wish her every success in the role.
When Professor Travis launched the journal, he quoted Diderot in his first editorial, saying “We need a man to rise up in the academies and go down
to the workshops and gather material about the arts to be set in a book which will persuade artisans to read, philosophers to think on useful lines and the great
to make at least some worthwhile use of their authority and their wealth.” Travis’ concern was to promote and empower applied research that connected
university research to industrial practice. That concern has remained central to our thinking in deciding which work fits the journal’s scope: does an
article describe a laboratory trial conducted purely for scientific curiosity, or is it concerned with the interaction of workpieces and equipment in a
process which now, or in the future, could be important in practical manufacturing?
However, as we hand on the journal, we have recognised that our role as Editors-in-Chief has also expanded from Travis’ founding activity and now
includes the role of being gatekeepers of the journal’s quality. As editors, we are constantly under pressure from two sides to reduce the standards of the
journal. Less confident researchers, whose pay and promotion depend on the total number of their publications rather than their quality, often aim to publish
many papers out of a single research effort. However, this is of no value to the journal’s future readers who will want the maximum useful insight from the
smallest number of words. At the same time commercial publishers, whose shareholders demand maximum returns to investment, have access to confidential
data on journal subscription payments suggesting that their income would be maximised by publication of a higher number of lower quality articles.
As Editors-in-Chief, we therefore hold a unique role as the gatekeepers of the quality of the Journal. In the long term, the goal of academic publication
must be to create lasting valuable knowledge, to publish articles to which our successors in the research world will return and be grateful. Our understanding
of our role has been to try to maximise the chances of those articles appearing in the Journal of Materials Processing Technology and to minimise the number
of uninteresting repetitions of methodology whose only value is to increase the count of an individual authors publications. Under pressure from authors and
publishers, only the Editors-in-Chief whose names appear on the front cover of a journal can play this gatekeeping role of quality. As we hand on to our
successors with good will and wish them well, we hope they will be able to maintain this focus on quality.
To conclude, as Travis did in his opening 1977 Editorial, with our own paraphrase of Diderot’s remark,
May there be many researchers who will rise from their desks in the academies, go down to the workshops and gather the most insightful material about the
mechanical working arts, to be published only occasionally in an excellent journal which will persuade industrialists to read, academics to think on useful lines
and by which publishers may make at least some worthwhile use of their influence and wealth.

References

Allwood, J.M., Tekkaya, A.E., 2009. Knowledge in materials processing technology. J. Mater. Process. Technol. 209, 1–2.
Allwood, J.M., Tekkaya, A.E., 2012. Writing a review paper. J. Mater. Process. Technol. 212, 1–2.
Allwood, J.M., Tekkaya, A.E., 2015. Writing a good review for the Journal of Materials Processing Technology. J. Mater. Process. Technol. 215, 1–2.
Allwood, J.M., Tekkaya, A.E., 2016. Writing for the benefit of the reader. J. Mater. Process. Technol. 216, 1–2.
Travis, F.W., 1977. Editorial. J. Mech. Work. Technol. 1, 1–2.
Travis, F.W., 1990. Editorial. J. Mech. Work. Technol. 21, 1.
Travis, F.W., 2005. Opening address: my thanks to all those who over the years have supported Journal of Materials Processing Technology. J. Mater. Process. Technol. 167, 141–143.

⁎
Julian M. Allwood
Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom
E-mail address: jma42@cam.ac.uk
A. Erman Tekkaya
Institute of Forming Technology and Lightweight Components, Technische Universität Dortmund, Germany

⁎
Corresponding author.

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