JIRS Editorial, First Quarter 2024

I wish you, wholeheartedly, a Happy and Prosperous New Year; health and happiness for all.I am pleased and honored to continue working with you, and I thank you for your continuous cooperation and support.Together, we will continue improving our journal with the aim to make it one of the strongest in intelligent systems and robotics.Granted, we witness a major shift towards 'autonomous systems' and 'unmanned systems'.So be it!We have worked hard to register JINT as a premier publication in both areas.We start the 2024 year stronger than ever before.We received and processed, in 2023, 1354 contributed and invited papers.This is a new record -we received and processed 1332 papers in 2022.What is important to state is that after JINT switched, on August 1, to an Open Access publication, 383 contributed papers were submitted to our journal.Our commitment to the peer review process remains the same; we will publish the best quality papers following a very thorough review process.Please note that since the 2024 calendar year is, basically, the first in which JINT has switched to an Open Access publication, this year, we will 'combine' issues into quarterly ones -thus we will publish four issues of contributed papers.However, Topical Collections will be published separately, in addition to the contributed paper issues.There is no 'upper bound' on Topical Collection issues.This decision has been made with the objective to monitor submission numbers and reevaluate the situation towards the fall of 2024.We also have a diverse Editorial Board with complementary expertise that allows for detailed paper evaluations and reviews.We commit to continue working hard to speed up the paper review cycle.This is the least we can do for you, the authors, and readers.