It is with great pleasure that I write this editorial, my first since becoming Honorary Editor and Chair of the Editorial Advisory Panel. In taking on this responsibility I was keen to build on the good work of my predecessor, Professor Nick Jenkins. He handed over a journal now indexed by Thomson Reuters, with a recorded impact factor of 0·526 and broadly in very good shape.
I bring two main aspirations for my term of office. The first is to increase the speed of the journal as measured by three key metrics following submission: time to review, time to formal acceptance and time to publication online. The sooner that work is published the greater its potential impact. We are especially conscious of the importance to early-career researchers of seeing their work appear promptly. We celebrate and welcome the enthusiasm and passion of such researchers new to the field.
The second area for action concerns the international reach of the journal, not just in terms of its readership, but also in terms of authoring and refereeing. One particular early focus for my interest is to increase the number of papers submitted from the United States and Canada. Energy research and development has seen enormous changes in North America in the last 10 years and some of these changes are interestingly different from those seen over the same period in the European Union. We also have an ongoing, and growing, interest in energy innovation in developing countries.
As regards the journal and its scope – ours is an engineering journal and we are proud of that fact. However, it is not narrow in scope and our topics of interest extend beyond our core domain of civil engineering. We will consider papers on energy matters located at the outer boundary of engineering methods, but require some contact with the issues of engineering and an awareness that our readership is an engineering community. We are pleased to cast our net wide because it is at the boundaries and interfaces that so many successful energy innovations are occurring.
In this particular issue we see three examples of innovative thinking all relating to energy in our communities and built environment.
We have a thoughtful briefing article from Kent et al. (2016) on the important topic of information security in community energy. This is an important consideration for our increasingly smart energy future. Indeed, we shall be giving more thought to smart futures in an issue later this year.
We have a most interesting paper by Ascione et al. (2016) concerning heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) energy use in schools; an area where it appears that performance is falling well short of targets and policy-makers' hopes. The paper offers a most useful analysis of alternative HVAC solutions, comparing comfort criteria, energy use and whole-life costs, and provoking further thoughts about how to work towards ambitious decarbonisation targets, including avoidance of use of energy, not just improving efficiency. The conclusion of this study is a clear result in favour of air-to-air heat pump systems with heat recovery.
Third, we have a most interesting paper from Duarte and Ferreira (2016) stressing a somewhat unusual topic: energy harvesting from roads. I shall never think of speed bumps again in the same way. Might that bone-jolting experience also do something even more useful, such as light the sign to warn people of such safety measures and their need to slow down?
I am most grateful to Philip Pascall for his assistance and advice in respect of these three papers.
At this stage I would simply like to close by reminding you that it is possible to offer comment on all our papers, and even this editorial; instructions for doing so are given at the end of each paper. We greatly welcome your ideas, and if they are too extensive for a comment – why not write a paper?
