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FOUNDATIONS FOR SUCCESSFUL COMMUNICATION
Lippold was also to underline the importance of
the management of the peer review system through the
Editorial Board, as Principal Reviewers. On occasion the
review system could comprise up to 50 people at a time
who, according to their area of expertise, were capable of
assessing papers in order to meet the quality requirements
and the time frame needed for publication.
16
In total there
were 194 reviewers for WiW and it remained essential to
extend the number of reviewers beyond this to cover the
increasing quality and number of papers being submitted
for publication
.
The costs of in-house publishing of WiW still
continued to be problematic with expenses exceeding budget due to the necessary overlap
of IIW Secretariat staff to accommodate the retirement of Souville in 2012, after nearly a
decade of excellent service overseeing the production of the journal. The desired move out
of self-publishing finally eventuated when the Chair of the TMB, Prof. Gary B. Marquis
(Finland), announced that year that ‘a new partnership with world-renowned publisher,
Springer-Verlag augurs well for the future of the journal which will hence become available
to tens of thousands of new engineers, researchers and industrial partners’.
17
Lippold was to
endorse Marquis’ remarks by saying that this move assisted greatly in the acceptance of the
journal and its status as a front-line technical journal.
The Editorial Board was to make numerous changes to streamline
systems including the implementation of a modern electronic editorial
system to greatly reduce the review timeframe. The online editorial system
enabled approval for papers to be published quickly, allowing papers to
be made available online up to four months before they appeared in hard
copy print.
18
As a result IIW moved into the electronic age with both the
e-version and printed version of its celebrated journal being made available.
The early publication of articles was taken to a higher level later with the
introduction of ‘online first’ whereby subscribers could download papers
before publication and pay for them individually.
19
In addition a new homogeneous design was introduced for IIW books and booklets
to mirror the changes to the design layout of the journal. IIW was also to venture into
the world of e-publishing and a partnership was set up with a single printing/marketing
house, Woodhead Publishing, to facilitate this process. The first IIW books to benefit
from this were published in autumn 2012.
20
These were authoritative works on fatigue –
IIW Recommendations for the Fatigue Assessment of Structures by Notch Stress Analysis
and
IIW Recommendations for Methods for Improving Fatigue Strength of Welded Joints
.