Editorial 2024: moving forwards in the electronic age

Acta Informatica (2024) 61:331–332 https://doi.org/10.1007/s00236-024-00466-8 EDITORIAL Editorial 2024: moving forwards in the electronic age Henning Fernau1 Published online: 26 October 2024 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2024 Nearly two months earlier than last year, I am writing this editorial today. There are indeed reasons for doing this earlier… Acta Informatica is moving on to become a predominantly online journal, although there are still printed editions of this journal. You can see some of these changes happening already in this issue, which is the last issue of 2024. For instance, there are four papers in this issue that belong to three different Topical Collections. Why is this remarkable? Traditionally, Topical Collections (possibly even better known as Special Issues) were physical issues (hence their previous naming). This meant that authors had to wait for the publication of their paper until the last paper of the collection has been accepted. Otherwise, there was no way to have all papers of a collection appear together in one issue (or several subsequent issues) of a journal. The mentioned four papers are not the only or the last ones of their respective collections, to the contrary, they are the first ones. Yet, other papers will be appearing in these collections, but only later, whenever and actually at the very moment when they will have been accepted. This will be taken further from 2025 onwards: Unlike until very recently, accepted papers will get their full bibliographic information (and not only a preliminary DOI) upon acceptance. In a sense, there will be no `waiting lines’ anymore to become finally published. This has clearly some advantages for the authors. The slight and temporary drawback is that all this needs some administrative restructuring on the side of the publisher, and this is the main reason why we conclude this year’s volume of Acta Informatica earlier than usual. This also means that papers that got received in their final form after September 1st in 2024 will not appear in the 2024 volume of Acta Informatica but rather in the next volume, that of 2025. However, I am also very happy that, although we had considerably less time, we could publish more papers in this volume than last year. This is clearly also due to the fact that we have several Topical Collections opening their calls in 2024. In earlier times, Acta Informatica used to have a number of these Special Issues, but this tradition faded out a bit in recent years. Reviving this tradition will attract more submissions of high quality to our Henning Fernau 1 Universität Trier, FB 4 - Informatikwissenschaften, Trier, Germany 13 332 H. Fernau journal, and therefore I am also grateful to the Guest Editors of all the Topical Collections that are under way. In order not to forget anybody, let me list all Topical Collections that were open in 2024 together with their guest editors; with (EB), I have marked guest editors who are also serving on the Editorial Board. This can also serve as a hint to prospective authors concerning the interests of the EB members and hence also of the journal itself. With [+], collections are marked where papers appear in the last issue of the 2024 volume. – – – – – – – – – Advances in String Processing Algorithms and String Data Structures: Dominik Köppl (EB) and Golnaz Badkobeh. [+] Algorithms and Combinatorial Optimization: Fahad Panolan and Akanksha Agrawal (EB). [+] Selected Extended Papers of the 13th International Workshop on Non-Classical Models of Automata and Applications (NCMA 2023): Benedek Nagy and Rudolf Freund. Quantum Programming Languages: Theories and Methodologies: Nengkung Yu and Mingsheng Ying (EB). Selected Extended Papers from SOFSEM 2024: Henning Fernau (EB), Ralf Klasing (EB) and Serge Gaspers (EB). [+] Selected Extended Papers of the 2024 Annual Conference on Theory and Applications of Models of Computation (TAMC 2024): Bo Li and Xujin Chen. Selected Extended Papers from Machines, Computations and Universality (MCU 2024): Jérôme Durand-Lose and Enrico Formenti. Hyperproperties: Foundations and Applications: Hazem Torfah, Hadar Frenkel and Niklas Metzger. Selected Extended Papers of SMT 2024 and Related Papers: Yoni Zohar and Giles Reger. This should also serve as an inspiration to whoever thinks about running a Topical Collection. We have also introduced a new procedure for applications for organizing collections that was rather well received and helped a lot to start these collections. Please convey your ideas to us! So, we hope that we will move forwards into a good future of this journal that already has quite a tradition. Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. 13  (...truncated)