Editor's Message: The Relevance of Journals to Computer Science

摘要

Every scientific discipline builds on the past: new ideas invariably appear from the analysis, synthesis, and repudiation of prior work. Even an innovator like Sir Isaac Newton wrote to Robert Hooke on 15 February 1676: "If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants." A necessary prerequisite for building on the past is for the body of archival work to be of the highest possible quality. Work that enters the communal memory should have no errors that either that the authors are aware of, or that can be rectified by careful peer review. Of course, no process can hope to eliminate errors altogether, but archival work should be free from errors that can be avoided with reasonable care.