Editor's Foreword

The scope of the topic "algorithms" has been eminently expanded over the past two decades. Today it includes almost everything concerning how we should act to achieve any kind of goal (scientific, industrial, economic or whatever) and is even losing the connection to computers and/or software. The new open access journal, Algorithms (ISSN 1999-4893), has an obvious mission of promoting original research of this new world of algorithms. We are very proud of hereby publishing its inaugural issue.

Algorithms shall cover traditional areas like the design and complexity analysis of algorithms, approximation algorithms, computational geometry, cryptography, data structures and data compression, databases, information retrieval, distributed and parallel computation, graph algorithms, on-line computation and scheduling. More contemporary areas like algorithmic game theory, algorithmic mechanical design, Internet algorithms and quantum computation are also included, as are aspects of discrete mathematics like graph theory, number theory and random structures. Applications such as bioinformatics, economics and finance are also important. These are only examples and the world of discrete algorithms is almost limitless.

Algorithms has three features: first, it is an Open Access journal. Open access publishing, supported by authors or their institutions, is also much less costly for scientists who are readers and authors of journals. Papers can be rapidly published and freely accessed by readers. Secondly, submission of application-oriented work, such as experimental analysis of algorithms and case studies of real-world applications, is highly recommended. If appropriate, source codes can be included as a part of the paper or as supplementary materials and can be deposited by the publisher. Finally, considering the rapid expansion of our fields, we also welcome survey papers and proposals (guest-editorship) for special issues targeting emerging topics. We are looking for your enthusiastic contributions: it is you who promote this new journal and shall hopefully make it a top-ranking forum for our community.