Editorial
Research is shared with the world through the publication of scientific papers in conferences and journals. Between these two, journals are the traditional means for archival publication of research results across a broad range of disciplines. So it is in software engineering. Despite the important role that our conferences serve in furthering our field, journals still serve the role of disseminating and archiving more complete and mature results. Providing this avenue is crucial, given how software is present in human life more than ever. As a result, our community has the great responsibility to invent, develop, and deploy new techniques that assist developers everywhere in creating high-quality, safe, and secure software through productive and economically-feasible processes. Only by ‘seeing the research through’, that is, pushing it further so we understand the full ramifications of our inventions, can we guarantee that what we propose actually helps make the world a better place. As such, journal publications are as important as ever.
One might question the need for another journal. After all, our community already has quite a few existing journals. Some of these, however, experience backlogs that lead to a long delay between the original submission and eventual publication. Others are specialized, focusing on one or at best a handful of specific subareas. JSERD emerged in this context as the result of extensive discussions in the Special Software Engineering Committee (CEES) of the Brazilian Computing Society (SBC) that lead to the recognition of the need for a broad software engineering journal that promotes rapid publication. JSERD is this journal, and is based on four major principles.