In 2013, the Journal of Scheduling will celebrate its 15th birthday. The journal was launched in the Summer of 1998. There have been many changes along the way. In the early days, the journal was published by Wiley before moving to Kluwer and finally settling with Springer after Kluwer was acquired by Springer. Over the years, the journal has become increasingly popular and well regarded. We now regularly publish ten papers per issue. Although there have been many changes, some things have remained constant. For example, we have always maintained an interdisciplinary focus as an international forum for scheduling research across disciplinary backgrounds and boundaries. We have also always welcomed all kinds of scheduling research from the theoretical to the practical. In addition, our emphasis has always been on excellence. In our view, these features lie at the very heart of the journal and they will not change as long as we remain editors.

We have always welcomed special issues of the journal and we remain open to suggestions for special issues that focus on specific scheduling topics or special issues that contain the best papers presented at conferences. We work with our guest editors to insure that the refereeing standards for special issues are the same as for regular issues.

We are pleased to report that our journal has continued to demonstrate success throughout 2012. We are particularly pleased to note that according to eigenfactor.org, using its Article Influence score, the journal is now ranked 13th out of 72 journals in the Operations Research and Management Science category. Last year, we reported that the journal was ranked 23rd out of 73 journals by using this measure, so 2012 has seen a very significant positive movement in this regard. Our ranking in the SCImago Journal and Country Rank is 19th out of 77 journals in the category entitled, Management Science and Operations Research. Last year, we reported that it was 20th out of 76 journals in the same category so this also shows a positive (if more modest) increase in relative position.Our current Thompson Reuters impact factor is 1.051 and this places us in 30th position (from 77 journals) in the Operations Research and management Science category. The position improves to 23rd if the 5-year impact factor is used to rank the journals and it moves to 20th if article influence is employed. Between January and November 2012, the number of article downloadswas 23,843 (the figure for December was not available at the time of writing). During 2012, we had 171 new submissions to the journal.

Throughout 2012, the average time it has taken us to turn around an original submission (the time taken between submission and first decision) has been 85.6 days.We are pleased that this average is below 3 months but we are currently trying to put some gentle pressure on our Associate Editors and referees to bring the average turnaround time down even further. Although we are working hard to shorten our turn around time, it is important to understand that many papers submitted to the Journal of Scheduling are often fairly technical and thus require a longer refereeing time than some papers that are submitted to other journals.

As we said at the beginning of this editorial, there have been many changes since the journal first started almost 15 years ago. Over those years, many people have played a part in establishing the success of the journal and we are very grateful to all of them. In 2012, we had some significant changes to our Editorial Board. Several Associate Editors stood down and several new Associate Editors started. Our sincere thanks go to all our Associate Editors (old and new). Their efforts are so important to the success of the journal. We are also grateful to all the staff at Springer who make our job so much easier. Special thanks go to Matthew Amboy and Neil Levine. We would also like to formally welcome and thank Sudha Subramanian (our new Journal Editorial Office Assistant at Springer) and Supraja Yegnaraman (our new Production Editor). Sudha replaced Noel Ampong and Supraja replaced Robert Darnowsky. We are grateful for the past efforts of both Noel and Robert and we wish them all the best in their new endeavours. Finally, we would like to thank our readers and authors for making the Journal of Scheduling as successful as it is.