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Publishing Proceedings What Are MRS Proceedings? | Who Are The Editors? | Who Are The Authors? | FAQ NOTE: This page contains general information regarding publishing proceedings. For information specific to a particular meeting, go to the Meetings page, then select the appropriate meeting. What Are MRS Proceedings? MRS Symposium Proceedings have served as the record of MRS Meetings from the beginning of MRS and are a reservoir of information on materials developments over the past 25 years. Until the year 2000, the Proceedings were almost exclusively in the form of the “Blue Books” but since that time more and more of the Symposia have been publishing in electronic format as well. These electronic files, now totaling more than 13,000, are available on the MRS website to MRS members at no cost. (View the online proceedings) From an author’s point of view the free exposure of his or her work to the 13,000 members of MRS is a significant benefit of Proceedings publication, offering wider distribution and citation than the printed Blue Books alone. The Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) tallies the number of times the Proceedings are cited by the journals they cover and count this towards an individual’s citation index. Papers published as Proceedings are "snapshots in time," encompassing both recent research work as well as overviews of a field. The papers are not intended to serve as the whole story of a research project, but a rapid means of sharing a work-in-progress to the materials community. MRS is proud that its Meetings and Proceedings have hosted whole areas of research starting from their early days of study to maturity. The intent is to have each Meeting offer a choice of topics based upon what is most interesting at the time. It has been the opinion of some that MRS has altered the course of materials science and engineering by its choice of symposium topics. This is not the intent of the programming process, but arguably the Society has enabled a sizable number of topics at the "cutting edge" to enjoy their official launch to the broad materials community through its Meetings and subsequent Proceedings. It is fully anticipated that papers in the MRS Proceedings will reveal a limited number of data points of a research project in progress that will later be fully documented in respected materials journals. The speed of publication of the individual Proceedings papers is designed to keep pace with the need for immediate information exchange in the rapidly moving materials world. MRS is presently targeting the publication of Blue Books within four months of the Meeting while the electronic versions of the papers are posted as soon as each one is accepted—some are even posted before the end of the Meeting. The interdisciplinary mix of the MRS Meeting format and subsequent Proceedings publication exposes the research work to a broad cross-section of researchers who may not routinely read the specialty journal where the final research will reside. MRS believes so strongly in keeping the quality and value of the Proceedings high that it has established new publications guidelines and will only publish print volumes for Symposia for which a minimum percentage of the papers presented at the Meeting are submitted for publication. The Society feels that print volumes do not serve their intended purpose as a record of the Symposium if a significant portion of the papers are missing.
Who Are the Editors? Typically, symposium organizers are the editors of the Proceedings. As the lead experts in the topical collection of papers, they are the best people to designate reviewers and oversee critical elements of the book. On occasion, symposium organizers may appoint or recommend others to serve as editors. Since 2000 editors have handled their editorial review through an online manuscript review process which makes the Proceedings review process infinitely easier than before. The system features automatic manuscript tracking, reviewer/editor notification and compilation of author and subject indices. Who Are the Authors? Not all symposium speakers elect to publish their papers in the Proceedings, but the majority do. Authors include invited speakers as well as oral and poster presenters. Authors are expected to commit the same level of quality in the preparation of their paper as they do in preparation of their oral or poster paper during the Meeting. The online manuscript review process enables authors to upload their papers, check paper status, and submit revisions from their desktops or in the designated room during the week of the Meeting. FAQs
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