This issue contains eight interesting papers, again with very different flavours. I hope at least one flavour for everyone! Authors come from (alphabetically) Austria, Chile, Fiji, Germany, Iran, New Zealand, Romania, Spain, The Netherlands and the USA. We thus have an international mix as usual! This issue 22 (!) of volume 14 is also the last of the 2008 issues.

2008 has been a very unusual year. We have never had that many issues before, with a record number of papers (220) and pages (we are exceeding 3700). By way of comparison, volume 1 in 1995 contained 60 papers on 820 pages! But it is not volume that counts, but quality, and quality has been very good thanks to the tremendous efforts of our Editorial Board: Notice that we required about 1500 reviews in 2008, so even with the more than 300 editors we have at the moment it was a gigantic task for all involved. I really want to thank all active members of the editorial board, and I also want to thank my editorial assistant Dana Kaiser who was still able to handle the avalanche of papers. Due to the increasing popularity of J.UCS we have decided to be even more strict as far as quality of papers is concerned. This will also affect the citation index rating in the years to come. Officially, we are currently a bit below 0.4 but by examining citation mining carefully we have found that some important citations have been missed, so our index is actually close to 0.5. We expect that we can even do better than that in the future.

We are also proud to announce that in 2008 we made a significant new addition to our system: each article and issue published until 2007 has been assigned a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) which can be found above the abstracts. We thankfully acknowledge the support and help of the staff of the library of the Graz University of Technology and Robert Hoffmann for accomplishing the gargantuan task of registering all published papers. Now that the year 2008 has been completed, also the articles and issues of 2008 will be assigned a digital object identifier.

Many keep asking: How do we manage to provide such a large body of publications free of charge? Well, it has been Graz University of Technology and the Knowledge Management Center in Graz who have born the main financial burden in the past. However, it is a pleasure to inform you that as of 2009 UNIMAS, the Universiti Malaysia Sarawak, Malaysia, has signed an agreement that they will also contribute a substantial sum in the future and help us in many ways. Our thanks go to the Dean of Computer Science, my long term friend Dr. Narayanan Kulathuramaiyer (we just call him Nara) for making this possible.

As it happens, this will coincide with a change concerning the Editors in Chief: So far, the group consisted of Cris Calude, Arto Salomaa, Klaus Tochtemann and myself.

Cris and Arto have informed me that they want to step down as Editors in Chief, but are willing to stay on as members of the editorial board. We are grateful to Cris and Arto for their continuing support for almost 15 years (!). And we welcome Nara as new member of the Editors in Chief group. I will hang on as Managing Editor in Chief for the time being, and I ask you all to hang on as readers and contributors of J.UCS!

Happy reading, and don't forget to send us your best papers: J.UCS is starting to be a journal that is having considerable impact in computer science.

Yours,

Hermann Maurer, Managing Editor
Graz University of Technology, Graz, Austria
Email: hmaurer@iicm.edu