I am much honored to become a new Editor-in-Chief of the Asia Pacific Education Review (APER). I really appreciate the endless supports of previous editors, editorial board members, authors, and reviewers for the development of the APER. Due to their contributions, the 50th issue of the journal is published in June 2016. I am also much looking forward to working with the new executive editors, Dr. Seon-Young Lee and Dr. Young Hoan Cho, building on the great accomplishment of the last 16 years.

The APER has grown to be a prominent international journal in the Asia–Pacific region, focusing on mutual understanding and communication about education in diverse countries. This journal has been indexed in the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) by Thomson Scientific since 2005, and its 2-year impact factor substantially increased to 0.839 in 2014. Every year, the journal publishes four issues, one of which is a special issue focusing on the emerging and important topics such as “leading creative minds and talent development education.” It is now my mission to advance the quality of the journal through publishing significant articles that are meaningful for readers in the Asia–Pacific region and beyond.

The scope of this journal is broad in the field of education research, including comparative education, educational psychology, educational administration, educational technology, counseling, and lifelong learning. I want to promote the submission of various disciplines that explain educational phenomena and resolve school or lifelong learning problems. Although many studies published in this journal were carried out in the Asia–Pacific region, we also welcome comparative, cross-cultural, and review studies that are closely related to the educational issues. Particularly, I would like to invite researchers in under-represented countries to share their research findings and opinions with overseas readers through the APER. Researchers in the other regions like Europe and North America are also encouraged to submit their studies to the journal if the studies provide meaningful implications to Asia–Pacific educators and researchers.

Although the APER has a broad scope, authors need to pay attention to the fact that this journal is more interested in general education issues like teacher education, motivation, leadership, and online learning than content-specific topics in such subjects as language, mathematics, and science. This journal seldom accepted the manuscripts about the content-specific topics like foreign language speaking anxiety, biology education trends, mathematical thinking, and a medical education framework, which led to a low acceptance rate of the journal (10.9 % in 2015). To increase the acceptance rate, I highly encourage the submission of articles that can provide significant implications across multiple content areas.

The goal of this journal is to stimulate educational research in the Asia–Pacific region through international knowledge exchange and cooperation. To achieve this goal, we will continue to make great efforts to meet the needs of readers and authors. I would like to invite you to participate in improving educational practice and theory through this journal.