Editorial by Keith Howard

There have been three former editors/editorial teams for IJOPM. Colin New at Cranfield launched the journal and was Editor for volumes 1‐3 (1980‐1983); I held that position for volumes 4‐15; the UMIST editorial team edited volumes 16‐24. Andrew Taylor and Margaret Webster at the Bradford School of Management have, this year (2005) assumed responsibility for the current, 25th volume and, it is to be hoped will continue to fill the role for the foreseeable future.

In a sense, I “fell into the job”. Prior to doing so my working life began as an Engineer in South Africa and I then became an academic in the UK, at what has recently become known as Bradford University School of Management (BUSM). My subject was Management Science, and for the final five years I was Chairperson of a large and successful doctoral programme at Bradford.

The origins of Emerald are to be found in the BUSM. Some 50 members of the faculty invested, in 1968, in a new publishing company called MCB, the forerunner of Emerald. In 1983 I left Bradford to found a business school (now International Management Centres) which adopted as its methodology, action learning. I was responsible for Operations Management and research programmes. I benefited from IMC's achievement of running programmes in Europe, Africa, the Far East and Australia. This provided an opportunity of gaining first hand knowledge of management culture and practice in these regions.

Emerald has grown over the years through the launch and acquisition of journals. We have continued to research opportunities for new launches in emerging fields. Surprising though it might seem operations and production management was one of these – particularly from Europe (as Colin New states in his Editorial).

Colin was, in fact, one of the leading researchers in POM at the time, and we were delighted when he agreed to become Editor of the soon‐to‐be launched International Journal of Operations & Production Management (IJOPM) We felt it appropriate that the journal be edited from Europe, rather than the subject matter being confined to Europe.

Being a new journal, copy did not flow in, and this was not helped by the limited number of potential authors and the time‐consuming consequences of double‐blind reviewing. Though recognising that in Colin we had an editor at the heart of the POM network, who adopted a thoroughly rigorous approach we decided to take the editorship of the journal in‐house. We had as an objective, to grow the journal quickly, in terms of issues, and felt that we could achieve sufficient rigour for our academic and practitioner readers.

As an exercise in action learning(!) I decided to take on the task of editor myself. To assist in speeding up turn‐round to authors I moved to single‐blind reviewing, monitoring the quality of content very closely myself.

Now being outside mainstream academe, it was clear to me that I needed to strengthen the editorial team to maintain networks.

I was fortunate to “inherit” Chris Voss of the London Business School as Associate Editor, a position he held for many years. Chris has been a stalwart supporter of IJOPM through many volumes. It is no exaggeration to state that not a little of the success of IJOPM has been down to him. He continues, to this day, as a member of the EAB and, indeed, he is one of the contributors to this anniversary issue.

Ray Wild, who is well known throughout the POM field agreed to become Book Review Editor, and filled this role to great effect over many years.

I was also assisted in sourcing copy by Regional Editors. Amrik Sohal was particularly helpful in this respect, both in identifying good papers and writing papers himself.

At the time when I took on the editorship, Chris Voss was in the process of establishing the UK Operations Management Association (OMA). Many of the earlier volumes contained issues of conference papers emerging from that body. Some ten years on the OMA became the European Operations Management Association (EUROMA) – rapidly becoming well regarded internationally. EUROMA has a close link with IJOPM which continues to publish papers from its conferences.

My objective of increasing the number of issues in a volume was achieved by the publication of an extra issue each year from 1985 to 1993. The number of issues (12) published in that year has remained unchanged to this day.

Mindful of the need to remind prospective authors that only papers of quality would be accepted by IJOPM, dates of receipt and revision were printed at the head of articles. This, together with the percentage of rejections (which rapidly exceeded 50 per cent) and careful consideration of comments from external reviewers gave me, at least (!), comfort regarding the overall quality of content.

From the viewpoint that editors do like to communicate with readers I established a policy of writing an editorial in each issue, more or less – not simply listing the papers but addressing a matter of some interest to the POM community

One aim in which I was not successful was the generation of correspondence. This was disappointing as I recollected that some of my favourite reading of earlier years (the Operational Research Quarterly) was the correspondence pages, wherein the debate was not always anodyne in nature!

Editorship of a journal subject to the scrutiny of academics is a challenging task and there was some relief in the transfer of the editorship to Bob Hollier and his team at UMIST in 1995. There was, however, an awareness on my part that IJOPM had become firmly established, internationally, in its field. Over the next decade the UMIST team reinforced its position and I am sure that, now edited out of Bradford, IJOPM's reputation will continue to grow.