Dear Readers,

    We have made a rather drastic change to our editorial policy from this volume of RTRI's Quarterly Report (QR). I would like to take this opportunity to explain the reasons behind this change.

The QR, which contains translations from our Japanese technical journal, was conceived as a means of publishing these papers for an international readership. Up until now, each volume of our Japanese technical journal covered a specific subject, normally an area of railway technology, such as rolling stock, tracks, etc. Similar subjects reappeared at roughly yearly intervals. In other words, we had around twelve different subjects for this purpose. This was for the convenience of readers, who only needed to store relevant issues.

In the case of the QR, which inherited this same system, this has caused three problems arising from the different issuing periods of the two journals, the Japanese technical journal being published monthly, whereas the QR is issued quarterly.

The main problem that stemmed from this was the delay in publishing papers, some of which had to wait until the QR on the appropriate subject appeared. The maximum delay could be up to three years, provided that we issued QRs under the same subjects as the Japanese technical journals. The second problem was that we had to reduce the number of papers published in the QR by about one third, due to space limitations.

This is one of the reasons why we decided to publish the RTRI Newsletter, the main objective being the prompt publication of our research. This delay caused the third, in a sense more important problem, the quality of the papers themselves.

Theoretically, we should be able to publish the best papers in the specific area written during the past three years. In practice, however, some good papers can easily become obsolete in three years. Therefore, we have to publish relatively recent papers even if some of them are not so good. You may wonder why we do not reconstruct a paper from original Japanese papers, but let me remind you that QR contains translations from our Japanese papers in principle. Rewriting a QR paper from original Japanese papers will be the next step. We also screened papers that seem to be irrelevant to an international readership.

The new policy is very simple. Select the best two or three papers from each Japanese technical journal, regardless of subject and relevancy to international readers, and put them together into one QR volume. From the different issuing periods, we collect three Japanese technical journals as candidates for one QR. The obvious drawback to this new policy is the inconvenience it causes readers who previously only had to store relevant QR volumes. However, we don't think that this will cause too much of a problem, because we are planning to put the contents of each QR on to a Web site, so that readers will be able to search for or retrieve papers via the Internet.

In addition to this new editorial policy, we have made slight style changes to the QR. We will no longer regularly carry a message in the first page of the QR. Instead, we will write an editorial note. Occasionally, we will include messages.

We hope that readers will welcome this new policy and would also appreciate any comments or opinions from readers by post.

Best regards,

Takahiko OGINO
Editor Editor-in-Chief
Quarterly Report of RTRI