With this first issue of the new millennium (for all but the mathematically challenged), a number of important changes are afoot for The Condor. As the new Editor, I want to first extend a most sincere Thank You on behalf of the Cooper Ornithological Society to Walt Koenig for his five years of exemplary service as Editor of The Condor.
Beginning with this issue, The Condor is now also available in a fully electronic version to institutional subscribers as part of the BioOne initiative. BioOne is an innovative, nonprofit collaboration among scientific societies under the auspices of the American Institute of Biological Sciences (AIBS), academe, and the commercial sector. The goal of this effort is to provide low-cost and highly functional electronic access to scientific journals published by (relatively) small scientific societies. The journals participating in the BioOne initiative will have cross-journal search capability (including references) in a single online, cross-linked database. Nearly 30 journals belonging to member societies of the AIBS are participating in this initial effort to create a common database of leading journals in a variety of disciplines within the biological sciences.
By the end of this year, the Cooper Ornithological Society plans to make electronic subscriptions available to individual members, and to provide a web-based archive of the first 100 years of The Condor that would be fully text-searchable and available for free on the worldwide web. We already have begun to make greater use of electronic communication between the editorial office and our manuscript authors and reviewers in order to reduce the time it takes from initial submission of a manuscript to its publication. Further increase in the electronic processing of manuscripts will be taking place over the coming months to make our publication as timely as possible.
Other changes in store for 2001 include posting of each issue's Table of Contents and Abstracts on the Cooper Ornithological Society homepage ( http://www.cooper.org) as soon as each issue is assembled, which at present is several months in advance of actual publication. We also have begun to include Spanish (or other appropriate language) abstracts regularly with Feature Articles and Short Communications, with the goal of having foreign-language abstracts accompany all articles of each issue by the end of this year. We also have made several small changes in format for manuscripts; please refer to the Information for Contributors that appears in this issue.
All of these efforts are aimed at reducing the turnaround time between submission and publication of your research, and to increase the timeliness, availability, and utility of the science published in The Condor for the worldwide scientific community. It should be an exciting year.
