Editorial: Farewell 2013, Welcome 2014

THE IEEE Transactions on Services Computing (TSC) had a great year in 2013 and will have an even better year in 2014. In 2013, TSC expanded in a number of dimensions, including scope, editorial board, and contributing communities. First, TSC expanded its scope by introducing the new taxonomy of services computing (http://www.computer.org/ portal/web/tsc/taxonomy). This new taxonomy broadens the scope of TSC from the foundations of services computing to cover cloud computing services, big data technologies, the Internet of Things (IoT), social computing, and business management. This new taxonomy refl ects the continued advancements of services computing from both services science and services engineering perspectives. Second, TSC has expanded its editorial board to 43 associate editors in response to the broadening scope of TSC and the growing community of researchers and practitioners as authors and readers. More importantly, the TSC community continues to expand and attract both technical professionals and business management professionals. In recognition of its important role, TSC has been indexed by major indexing systems, such as Thomson Reuters (ISI), EI Compendex, and Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-e). TSC welcomes 2014 with a number of new projects on the way. First, we are introducing survey papers as a featured section in TSC regular issues, in addition to special topic sections where guest editors are invited to solicit submissions on hot and emerging topics of special interests. The survey papers section will be dedicated to publishing survey articles on all areas of services computing covered by the TSC taxonomy. In addition, we are planning to work with the steering committees of the IEEE International Conference on Web Services and the IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing to create TSC special sessions. Authors of TSC accepted papers are offered an opt-in opportunity to present their work at one of these two conferences. Furthermore, I am working closely with the TSC advisory board to explore new dimensions to attract higher readership and authorship from the business and management community. Finally, I will continue to work with the TSC editorial board through multiple threads to maintain the average review cycle of three months and the average queuing time of less than one year for accepted papers to appear. One new thread of such effort is to continue TSC’s participation in the newly introduced Reviewer Appreciation Program by the IEEE Computer Society. As Editor-in-Chief, I am very pleased with the growth of TSC in 2013. I would like to take this opportunity to express appreciation for the continued contributions from authors, readers, associate editors, reviewers, TSC advisory board members, as well as the IEEE Computer Society staff and TSC assistants. Finally, I hope that you will enjoy reading the fi rst issue of TSC in 2014. I look forward to your continued contributions as an author, a reader, a reviewer, or a volunteer.