Remote Sensing Open Access Journal: Increasing Impact through Quality Publications

Remote Sensing, an open access journal (http://www.mdpi.com/journal/remotesensing) has grown at rapid pace since its first publication five years ago, and has acquired a strong reputation. It is a " pathfinder " being the first open access journal in remote sensing. For those academics who were used to waiting a year or two for their peer-reviewed scientific work to be reviewed, revised, edited, and published, Remote Sensing offers a publication time frame that is unheard of (in most cases, less than four months). However, we do this after multiple peer-reviews, multiple revisions, much editorial scrutiny and decision-making, and professional editing by an editorial office before a paper is published online in our tight time frame, bringing a paradigm shift in scientific publication. As a result, there has been a swift increase in submissions of higher and higher quality manuscripts from the best authors and institutes working on Remote Sensing, Geographic Information Systems (GIS), Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS), GIScience, and all related geospatial science and technologies from around the world. The purpose of this editorial is to update everyone interested in Remote Sensing on the progress made over the last year, and provide an outline of our vision for the immediate future. Having started in March 2009, Remote Sensing currently has an impact factor of 2.623 (Rank 6 out of 27 international journals published in Remote Sensing, GIS, and Spatial Science). A comparison with some of best remote sensing journals (Figure 1) shows the rapid gains made by Remote Sensing. In 2013, we received 650 articles for peer-review, of which we accepted 280 (43%), rejecting the rest 57% (Table 1). From 24 papers published in January 2013, the number increased to 39 in December 2013. There has been a further, highly significant increase in these numbers in 2014. For example, 216 papers were under consideration for publication in just two recent months, April and May, of which we accepted and published 45 in April and 52 in May, a total of 97 (45%). The 216 papers were submitted at various points over previous months and were in for decision during the two months mentioned. What this means is that, in the future, we can expect over 100 papers awaiting OPEN ACCESS