State of the Journal

WELCOME to 2018’s first issue of the IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (TPDS). I’m excited with my new role as incoming Editor-in-Chief of TPDS and look forward to serving the community over the next few years. As a brief introduction, I’m a Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at Rutgers University, and have a rich service record to the IEEE and the leading conferences and journals. You find more information about me at http://parashar. rutgers.edu. One of my first duties as incoming EIC is to recognize and thank David Bader for his leadership, dedication and tremendous service to TPDS. I’m inheriting a very healthy publication: As the EIC, David has worked hard on increasing the visibility and relevance of TPDS, as well as updating and revising the Transaction’s scope to highlight several new areas. He also improved the timeliness of the review process, reducing the time to first decision to 50 days, while managing review load by appropriately expanding the size of the editorial board. TPDS was among the first of the IEEE transactions to adopt the OnlinePlus publication model, and the abstract booklet and disk are distributed on a quarterly basis to subscribers. My goal as EIC is to continue to work on increasing the visibility and relevance and impact of TPDS, as well as the quality and timeliness of the review process, to ensure that TPDS is the premier Transactions in the field. The IEEE is a hallmark of quality for technical publication. The value TPDS brings to the international community is in its collection of the highest quality research that is relevant to academia, industry, and laboratories. I will investigate new opportunities for TPDS to capture the best research while maintaining its emphasis on highest quality papers. TPDS also needs to respond to a dynamic and rapidly evolving research and publication landscape. As EIC, I will work with the IEEE community to ensure that TPDS does respond appropriately, and will carefully work with the editorial board to revisit the scope and recruit new editorial board members as needed. An important and rapid growing conversation is related to the repeatability of published research and the submission of supplementary material such as code and data. I am part of this conversation, and will work with the EB and the community to explore how to bring these practices in meaningful and measured ways to TPDS. In the meantime, I am happy to inform you that TPDS is part of IEEE DataPort (https://ieee-dataport.org) and CodeOcean (https://codeocean.com/). These services enable authors to store data and code as part of the article submission process. I strongly encourage you to make use of these services as plan your TPDS submissions. Finally, I am planning to organize editorial board meetings and information sessions, as needed, at leading IEEE conferences related to parallel and distributed systems. Stay tuned for more information! I hope you will continue to submit your best papers to TPDS!