As we move into 2017, Radiocarbon is now in its 59th year of publication. After 13 years of service to Radiocarbon, Mark McClure has moved on to a new position working at the World Health Organization in Washington, DC. We are very lucky to be able to welcome back Kim Elliott as our managing editor. As many friends and readers of Radiocarbon will know, Kim was our managing editor previously from 1999 until 2003 and had worked at our journal since 1993 as assistant editor under managing editors Renee Kra (1967–1996) and David Sewell (1996–1999).
Volume 59 also marks other changes. It is our second year in cooperation with Cambridge University Press as our publisher. The first year was very successful and the transition went very smoothly. In 2017, we will move to 6 issues per year, which will allow us to expand and handle the several topical conferences which are now included in Radiocarbon. We will publish the Proceedings of the 2015 Dakar Conference, which will begin with Volume 59, Nr 2, as well as the Proceedings of the 2016 Radiocarbon and Archaeology Conference, which was held in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Radiocarbon now publishes several conference series as well as the triennial Radiocarbon Conference. These include the “Radiocarbon and Archaeology” series and the “Radiocarbon and Environment” and “Radiocarbon and Diet” conferences. The second meetings of both of the latter conferences will be held in 2017 in Debrecen (Hungary) and Aarhus (Denmark), respectively. It’s exciting to see this expansion of both the journal and the topics covered by Radiocarbon.
Rapid developments in the area of radiocarbon calibration will also generate more interest as we move forward. The international calibration (IntCal) working group is already having discussions about how to revise and improve the calibration curves, given the growing interest in annually resolved tree rings and other challenges to the current approach. There will be a special session related to IntCal and dendrochronology at the European Geophysical Union (EGU) in Vienna this spring, as well as a workshop after the AMS-14 meeting in Ottawa this coming August. We expect a new calibration volume to be forthcoming in the next couple of years, as a result of these efforts.
Radiocarbon continues to increase its role in publications related to these areas, as well as other applications of cosmogenic radionuclides. I encourage you to continue to publish new science here, in the journal of record for this field.
A J Timothy Jull, Editor
