Editorial: Service Computing in 2015

AS we enter 2015, I have some very exciting news. First, with IEEE CS Publication Board approval, IEEE Transactions on Service Computing (TSC) will become a bi-monthly journal and publish every two months and six issues annually, instead the current quarterly publications. Second, in response to the growing community of researchers and practitioners, including both authors and readers, TSC editorial board is now composed of 44 distinguished associate editors, including 10 IEEE fellows, one ACM fellow, five AAAS fellows, and two members of the Academy of Europe (Academia Europaea). In 2015, TSC will continue to improve the coverage of cutting edge Service Computing research. First, TSC will continue feature the special topic sections in its regular issues. In these special topic sections, the guest editors are invited as the subject experts to solicit submissions on hot and emerging topics in Service Computing area, such as cloud computing services, big data technologies and services, interactions of Service Computing with Internet of Things (IoT), social media, business process management, security, trust and dependability. In addition, TSC will start a new feature, the surveys section, in the first issue in 2015. We will dedicate the surveys section to review articles or research survey articles in all areas of service computing, covered by the TSC taxonomy. As an effort to explore new dimensions of service computing research and expand readership and authorship to a broader audience, we are organizing a special issue entitled “In Search of a New Alignment in Service Research”, with the guest editors from business management, services research and computer science: Michael Goul, a professor and chair of the business school in Arizona State University, and a member of TSC executive advisor board members, Paul Maglio, the editor in chief of INFORMS Service Science, and Patrick Hung, a member of the TSC editorial board. We conjecture that such a special issue will attract readership and authorship from business and management community. Another new initiative is being discussed with both TSC executive advisory board and TSC editorial board and the steering committee of three joint conferences: IEEE International Conference on Web Services (ICWS), IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing (Cloud) and IEEE International Conference on Service Computing (SCC). The ideas of this initiative is to create TSC special sessions and offer the authors of TSC accepted papers an opt-in opportunity to present their work at one of these three upcoming conferences. This endeavor can be seen as a new initiative towards the engagement of close connection of TSC authors and TSC publications with the Service Computing community at large. I am very pleased with the milestones that TSC has achieved in the last two years. I would like to take this opportunity to thank the continual contributions from the authors, readers, reviewers, TSC advisory board members, TSC editorial board members, the IEEE Computer Society staff and TSC assistants. They have contributed to every success that TSC has made to date, including maintaining the average review cycle of two to three months and the average queuing time of six-eight months for accepted papers to appear. I would like to wish you a Happy New Year. As always, we love to hear your suggestions and comments on the ways to improve TSC in 2015. I look forward to your continued support as an author, a reader, a reviewer, or a volunteer.