The quality of a research journal is determined by the quality of the articles that are submitted. But the quality of the final texts as they are accepted is also determined by the quality of the reviews. Our journal is privileged to have had excellent reviewers on board during its whole history. For each of them there will come a moment to terminate their membership of the journal’s editorial board, and for others to join in and replace them.

In the past years the number of submitted articles has increased, and with that the need for sufficient reviewers. We had a period during which it could take as long as three months for an appropriate reviewer to become available and authors were confronted with extensive waiting times. Fortunately new reviewers were found and the editorial board was extended. In addition, more use is made of reviewers that only occasionally review articles for us without serving on the board.

In this editorial I want to acknowledge some going and coming editorial board members. The following colleagues left the board for various reasons: Virginie Albe, Alister Jones, Denise McGregor, Gary O’Sullivan, and Johannes Strobel. I want to thank all of you for the work you did for the journal. I want to mention in particular Alister Jones, who is almost from the first hour of the journal and for many years did a tremendous lot of work for it. Many thanks for that, Alister. New board members are: Stephanie Atkinson, Chi-Cheng Chang, Wendy Fox-Turnbull, Grietjie Haupt, Eila Lindfors, Sule Pektas and Maria Svensson. Welcome on board and I look forward to working with you. You all did reviews for some years already to such an extent that membership of the board seemed an appropriate appreciation for your continued efforts.

I also want to mention a change in the structure of the editorial board. For many years the journal had one ‘regional advisory editor’ and dr. John Williams had that post for a long period of its existence. During John’s period the number of contributions from the Australasian region has increased substantially and there is no doubt that this is at least partially due to his efforts. In line with other journal’s policies, we decided, however, to terminate the position of regional advisory editor. We are now in the position that all regions that have serious research on technology, design and engineering education submit to our journal regularly. We still see each individual member of the editorial board as an ambassador for her/his country to ensure that researchers in those countries will be made aware constantly of the option for publishing in our journal. I want to thank John Williams for all the work he did to stimulate his colleagues in the Australasian region to submit to our journal. I also want to mention that he is still the unbeaten champion in the number of reviews he did so far. John, I very much appreciate and value all your efforts, even more since you became the editor of the Australasian Journal of Technology Education of which you were the primary initiator and yet never diminished your work for ITDE. I hope you will still be around for many years to come to assist me in maintaining a high quality of the journal.

Finally I want to take the opportunity to introduce our new app. The banner for this can be found here: http://www.springer.com/education+%26+language/learning+%26+instruction/journal/10798. This app allows readers to access all articles directly on their mobile devices. I have tried it myself and I think it is a great new tool that many will like very much for its transparent use and excellent readability. It is available both through Google Play and iTunes. Thank you, Springer, for including our journal in the list of those for which you have provided such an app. It will, no doubt, contribute to our readers’ appreciation for this journal.