In writing this editorial we can report that year-on-year we have a good flow of new papers arriving and this has led to Volume 59 containing many strong papers. A total of 701 papers were submitted in 2006, but only 160 papers were published in 2007. Expressing these two numbers as a percentage, 23%, gives a very rough measure of the acceptance rate for papers and a guide to how tough editors and referees need to be. Increasingly as joint-editors we are having to reject papers without recourse to sending them to referees. These are papers that are either of poor quality or do not fit with the objectives of the journal.

We have published 41 Case-Oriented Papers in Volume 59, excluding papers in two Special Issues. This is an encouraging statistic, with the number of Case-Oriented papers typically being 4–5 in each regular issue. A number of Special Issue papers were also case-oriented. Not every reader agrees with our classification of papers into Case-Oriented, but we receive advice from referees on the classification of papers as well as making our own judgment. Not every Case-Oriented paper describes an actual implementation, but often there are reasons for this, including commercial confidentiality. In addition, we can only select for publication from the papers that are submitted to the journal. The editors like to encourage authors to submit case papers to the journal. We continue to urge practitioners to generate such papers and encourage colleagues to do so. In the past, readers of the journal expected to hear about the work of the major OR groups and it is good to see that Volume 59 includes some papers of this type. We are also pleased that the journal has risen in recently published statistics on citation count and the associated Impact Factor.

We have published two Special Issues this last year: Intelligent Management Systems in Operations and OR in Government, the latter of which attracted considerable interest, and illustrated some of the work in a strong sector for OR. Discussion on the need for proselytizing about OR has featured recently in the newsletter of the Operational Research Society, Inside OR. This year we look forward to special issues on Data Envelopment Analysis, Credit Scoring and Data Mining, as well as to a supplementary issue on papers from the OR 50 Conference.

We are grateful to our two Assistant Editors. Professor Uwe Aickelin has ensured a steady stream of Book Reviews, thanks to his list of reviewers, and discussion has been encouraged in the section on Viewpoints, handled by Dr Aris Syntetos.

The backlog of papers awaiting publication remains relatively high on the Advanced Online Publication (AOP) system, but we are pleased to note that this backlog is starting to fall and should continue to do so as page lengths in 2008 were increased and will again be so in 2009, particularly in the first half of the year. Our longer term aim is to reduce the time a paper is on AOP to 6–9 months. It is good to see that readers are accessing AOP papers and authors are citing them.

In the UK, universities have been taking part in the Research Assessment Exercise. A review of work undertaken since 2001 has featured in this exercise. OR features in two categories—as part of Business and Management and as part of Operational Research and Statistics. Initial results of this exercise will have become available by the time this issue appears and it will be interesting to explore its impact on this journal.

As always it would not be possible to produce this journal without help from many teams of people. We thank the Editorial Administrator, Sarah Parry and the other staff of the Operational Research Society, managed by Gavin Blackett, and staff at our publisher, Palgrave, especially Emma Jones, the new member of the team, backed up by Jane Torr, David Williams and Di Owen. All these people help run the journal on a day-to-day basis and contribute ultimately to its success with the readership. Thanks also go to the members of the International Advisory Board who offer us advice and support from time to time.

We hope that you have enjoyed the papers in the journal over the past year and will continue to do so with the propitiously numbered Volume 60 (this publication occasion will be noted more formally when the 60th birthday is reached). We thank our many authors for supplying papers and again offer sincere thanks to the many hard-working referees who give so generously of their time. We will be listing the referees who reviewed in 2008 in a future issue. Of course, the readers who study and cite papers in JORS are our mainstay and also deserve our thanks.