General
The Institute of Software of the Chinese Academy of Sciences is pleased to announce a new journal in computer science area. It is the "International Journal of Software and Informatics"(ISSN 1673-7288), which will have its first issue published before end of this year. Its editor-in-chief is Prof. Ruqian Lu of Institute of Mathematics. Its associate editor is Prof. Barry Boehm of University of Southern California. Its editorial board is still being put together. Due to its genuinely international character, two thirds of the editorial members will come from outside of mainland China. It is also expected that two thirds of the published papers are submitted by non mainland China authors.

Just as its name reveals, IJSI is an international journal for publishing papers in software and broad areas of informatics. IJSI has an editorial board consisting of internationally well known experts. IJSI welcomes from all over the world original papers in all areas of Software and Informatics. IJSI will focus on theoretical foundation and practical research of software techniques; other areas of computer science will also be considered. IJSI topics will be organized partially different from those commonly appearing in other computer science publications and educational courses. Specifically, IJSI will establish dedicated sections for emerging research areas that have been recognized internationally. For the start, the topics of IJSI will include eight areas.
* Computer software
* Theoretical computer science
* Network and information security
* Formal methods
* Artificial intelligence and pattern recognition
* Multi-Media techniques
* Border areas (including quantum informatics; bioinformatics; neuro-informatics; cognitive science; etc.)
* Computer aided applications

Each submission should be marked with the area to which it belongs. The topics are not invariant. They will be renewed with time. The targeted readers of IJSI are mainly faculties, technical staffs, and students in universities and research institutions, while readers in broader IT industry and computer application field may also be benefited.

For the start, International Journal of Software and Informatics (IJSI) is a quarterly journal. It publishes four issues in the year. The number of issues may be increased with the increase of submissions.

Submission to the Journal
All manuscripts must be submitted in English. Each manuscript should have title, abstract, keywords and a reference list of literature. Manuscripts must be submitted electronically as PDF, PS, or Word format.
Please be sure that your submission contains the following:
* High quality and originality contribution of the author(s),
* In-depth state-of-art review of the field of author's contribution, in particular a comparison with recent related literature,
* Well organized presentation and well written English text,
* For theoretical work, originality and rigorous proof of the new theory,
* For engineering work, experimental data with theoretical analysis,
* For project progress report, new principles and new techniques invented,
* For work partly published in the past, publication state and novelty of the current work.
Full-length manuscripts and research description should be submitted to ijsi@iscas.ac.cn

Peer Review Policy of IJSI
All submissions must go through an anonymous peer review process. Each manuscript will be reviewed by at least two independent reviewers. Like all reputable scientific journals, we ask all reviewers to adhere to the strictest principles of scientific publishing. All reviews should be finished in a relatively short period of time.

Enhanced versions of papers previously published in conference proceedings may be considered provided they are of particularly high quality or include substantially new material. Any such submission should be accompanied with a declaration on where and when it has been published.

We advise the authors not to submit manuscripts having at least one of the following characteristics: (1) Lack of originality. (2) Report some engineering experience but without new invention or discovery. (3) Report some experimental data but without theoretical analysis. (4) Lack of enough citation and analysis of recent related work. (5) Written in poor English language. (6) Lack of clear presentation. (7) With many typos and/or concept and notation confusions. (8) Most of the content has been published in another journal. (9) Being submitted for publication elsewhere. (10) Outside the aims and scope of the journal.

Authors will be notified about each review result together with reviewers' comments and suggestions. All authors should revise the manuscript by carefully reading the comments/suggestions of reviewers. When resubmitting the revised manuscript, authors should prepare a detailed list of revision, explaining item by item how the reviewer’s critiques are taken into consideration.

Fast Turnaround Publication Policy of IJSI
IJSI accelerates the review process and shortens the publication period in the following way: Manuscripts having serious flaws or drawbacks will be rejected by area editors or editors-in-chief without refereeing. Authors of these manuscripts will be informed within a few weeks after the submission is received. Authors of manuscripts entering the reviewing process are supposed to receive the first reviewing results within 3-4 months. Most of the submissions will get a final conclusion of accept or reject within six months. It is expected that an accepted paper will be published within one year after submission.

We encourage program committees of academic conferences to recommend their best papers to be published in IJSI. These recommended papers will go through a much shorter period of reviewing process provided that the conference’s reviewing process has been strict and rigorous and that an agreement is reached as early as possible. We also encourage individual authors to submit their improved proceeding papers to IJSI. Their paper’s review process will also be shortened.

Special Issue and Special Section of IJSI
IJSI will publish special issue or special section as whole or part of a regular issue. Depending on the number of published papers, a special issue may contain one or several special sections. The papers may come from conference proceedings or from particular calls for papers. Papers accepted for publication in special issues or special sections will generally be published in shorter time than regular submissions.

Publication Fee
There will be no page charge if the paper is finally accepted, neither will there be any honorary for reviewers. A limited number of reprints will be provided to the authors.