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Editorial

New Vibration Online Journal Will Get Us Back to Basics

Professor of Vibration Engineering, College of Engineering, Mathematics and Physical Sciences, University of Exeter, Kay Building, Exeter EX4 4QF, UK
Vibration 2018, 1(1), 1-2; https://doi.org/10.3390/vibration1010001
Submission received: 29 September 2017 / Revised: 29 September 2017 / Accepted: 29 September 2017 / Published: 17 October 2017
When Vibration approached me to be its founding Editor-in-Chief, it was explained to me that the key selling points of this new online journal would be as follows:
1. As an MDPI online journal, all articles published in it are made immediately available worldwide under an open access licence; this means that everyone has free and unlimited access to the full text and is free to reuse the published material if proper reference to the original publication is given.
2. There is genuine commitment across the board to rapid publication.
3. Since it is an online journal, there is no limit on the length of articles, which allows for the reporting of research in minute detail.
4. MDPI will substantially invest in Vibration initially by allowing all accepted manuscripts submitted in the first three years to be published under an open access license, with article processing charges (APCs) waived.
These four, together with the simple and very telling title of this journal, as well as the superb editorial board in the making, convinced me that Vibration has every chance to stand head and shoulders above the plethora of other new online journals mushrooming around the world today, many of them of dubious quality.
In particular, I like the fact that we can exploit the online nature of this new journal and let authors describe their research work in minute detail. In our line of work, we rely on quite complex mathematical apparatuses that demand numerical tools and on increasingly challenging experimental setups, yielding sensor outputs that require new and powerful tools from statistics, probability, and complexity science to interpret them. I have felt for some time that limiting the length of articles pertinent to vibration science in standard print journals, even of the highest quality, was detrimental to the key principle of scientific publishing: to provide sufficient detail so that research can be independently repeated. Vibration has the potential to solve this problem by encouraging and requiring the reporting of minute, but not trivial, detail of the research precisely to revitalise and uphold this key principle.
Any successful scientific journal needs both readers and writers—scientific content providers and consumers. Considering the fast moving and connected world in which we live today, I believe that easy and free access to, as well as high scientific quality of, research papers that are easy to comprehend are the key ingredients of a successful journal that will attract many readers. Authors, on the other hand, want quick editorial decision-making and highly reputable medium for publishing their research. Everybody wants to optimise their effort and nobody wants to waste their time. The worldwide explosion of demand for higher education in general and research degrees in particular in the last two decades now generates vast quantities of scientific research. It is well known that such research is not accomplished if it is not published. However, the existing well-established research journal outlets pertinent to vibration science and engineering struggle to keep up with the demand, yielding longer publication lead times with very high attrition rates for submitted manuscripts, which does not always indicate a lack of quality when a manuscript is rejected. This in turn negatively affects career prospects of many young researchers in the area of vibration who unduly wait sometimes years to have the results of their research published in top-quality journals.
My plan is to help them and use my two-year term of office as the founding Editor-in-Chief of Vibration to establish it as a highly reputable medium for the fast reporting and dissemination of exciting, top-quality, vibration-related research. I feel that, with the right support from the international community of researchers, Vibration has the chance to improve the current situation and unblock the often clogged up publication routes for good vibration-related papers. MDPI has given the worldwide vibration research community the chance to make these improvements with Vibration, and I have every intention of making sure that we exploit this opportunity.

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MDPI and ACS Style

Pavic, A. New Vibration Online Journal Will Get Us Back to Basics. Vibration 2018, 1, 1-2. https://doi.org/10.3390/vibration1010001

AMA Style

Pavic A. New Vibration Online Journal Will Get Us Back to Basics. Vibration. 2018; 1(1):1-2. https://doi.org/10.3390/vibration1010001

Chicago/Turabian Style

Pavic, Aleksandar. 2018. "New Vibration Online Journal Will Get Us Back to Basics" Vibration 1, no. 1: 1-2. https://doi.org/10.3390/vibration1010001

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