La dolce vita at TOPLAS

Abstract

La Dolce Vita at TOPLASDear TOPLAS authors, reviewers, and readers, The TOPLAS community is working in exciting times for research in programming languages and programming systems.As every aspect of life becomes more dependent on computer applications and systems, what programming languages and systems we design and choose, and how they help us build correct, well performing, reliable, secure, and evolving systems remain central questions that our discipline seeks to answer.TOPLAS provides a unique and well-cited forum for reporting on this research in depth without the strict deadlines and page limits imposed by conferences.For example, ACM reports that the average ACM digital library citations per TOPLAS article is 153 for articles published between 2003-2007.TOPLAS articles are clearly influencing our field.We encourage you to continue submitting excellent manuscripts!To provide authors with an attractive reviewing and publication venue, the TOPLAS Editor-in-Chiefs, AEs, and reviewers have sought and achieved a responsive reviewing and revision process.Although some decisions take longer, on average since 2008, TOPLAS has returned a decision and first round of reviews within 113 days of submission.We believe our time-to-decision achieves a good balance of responsiveness given the length of submission and detailed TOPLAS reviews provided.It takes a village to raise a TOPLAS article.We depend particularly on the TOPLAS reviewers to provide high quality and detailed assessments of each submission.We are very grateful to those reviewers who have served during our editorship.In 2009, 130 researchers reviewed one or more TOPLAS submissions, one or more times.There were 220 reviewers in 2008, and 188 in 2007.We list all your names in this editorial.Thank you!We also thank our Associate Editors.We currently have 15 Associate Editors, who are serving diligently.To increase community participation and accountability, TOPLAS has instituted and followed best practices for reviewing, conflict of interest, and Associate Editor term limits.We instituted a new policy of Associate Editor term limits to two three-year terms, renewable after the first three-year term.We also codified and published the conflict of interest and reviewer guidelines, which are available on the TOPLAS web page http://userweb.cs.utexas.edu/∼toplas/.In light of this policy and other circumstances, we have some outgoing and new TOPLAS Associate Editors.