Message from the Editor
Authors: Paul Thomas  
Published: January 2011

As usual, being an even year, the 23rd IAEA Fusion Energy Conference took place at Daejeon, Korea. The event was notable not just for the quality of the presentations but also for the spectacular opening ceremony, in the presence of the Prime Minister, Kim Hwang-sik. The Prime Minister affirmed the importance of research into fusion energy research and pledged support for ITER. Such political visibility is good news, of course, but it brings with it the obligation to perform. Fortunately, good performance was much in evidence in the papers presented at the conference, of which a significant proportion contain 'ITER' in the title.
Given this importance of ITER and the undertaking by the Nuclear Fusion journal to publish papers associated with Fusion Energy Conference presentations, the Nuclear Fusion Editorial Board has decided to adopt a simplified journal scope that encompasses technology papers more naturally. The scope is available from http://iopscience.iop.org/0029-5515/page/Journal%20information but is reproduced here for clarity:

Nuclear Fusion publishes articles making significant advances to the field of controlled thermonuclear fusion. The journal scope includes:

the production, heating and confinement of high temperature plasmas;

the physical properties of such plasmas;

the experimental or theoretical methods of exploring or explaining them;

fusion reactor physics;

reactor concepts;

fusion technologies.

The key to scope acceptability is now '....significant advances....' rather than any particular area of controlled thermonuclear fusion research. It is hoped that this will make scope decisions easier for the Nuclear Fusion office, the referees and the Editor.The Nuclear Fusion journal has continued to make an important contribution to the research programme and has maintained its position as the leading journal in the field. This is underlined by the fact that Nuclear Fusion has received an impact factor of 4.270, as listed in ISI's 2009 Science Citation Index.

The journal depends entirely on its authors and referees and so I would like to thank them all for their work in 2010 and look forward to a continuing, successful collaboration in 2011.

Refereeing

The Nuclear Fusion editorial office understands how much effort is required of our referees. The Editorial Board decided that an expression of thanks to our most loyal referees is appropriate and so, since January 2005, we have been offering the top ten most active referees over the past year a personal subscription to Nuclear Fusion with electronic access for one year, free of charge. This year, two of the top referees have reviewed four or more manuscripts in the period November 2009 to November 2010 and provided particularly detailed advice to the authors. We have excluded our Board Members, Guest Editors of special editions and those referees who were already listed in the last four years. Guest Editors' work on papers submitted to their special issues is also excluded from consideration. The following people have been selected:

Osamu Naito, Japan Atomic Energy Agency, Naka, Japan

Masahiro Kobayashi, National Institute for Fusion Science, Toki, Japan

Duccio Testa, Lausanne Federal Polytechnic University, Switzerland

Vladimir Pustovitov, Russian Research Centre, Kurchatov Insitute, Russia

Christopher Holland, University of California at San Diego, USA

Yuri Gribov, ITER International Organisation, Cadarache, France

Eriko Jotaki, Kyushu University, Japan

Sven Wiesen, Jülich Research Centre, Germany

Viktor S. Marchenko, Ukraine National Academy of Sciences, Ukraine

Richard Stephens, General Atomics, USA

In addition, there is a group of several hundred referees who have helped us in the past year to maintain the high scientific standard of Nuclear Fusion. At the end of this issue we give the full list of all referees for 2010. Our thanks to them!

Authors

The winner of the 2010 Nuclear Fusion Award was J.E. Rice et al for the paper entitled 'Inter-machine comparison of intrinsic toroidal rotation in tokamaks' (2007 Nucl. Fusion

47 1618–24). The prize was awarded at the Fusion Energy Conference in Daejeon, together with the 2009 Nuclear Fusion Award to Steve Sabbagh.

The Board of Editors

Roger Weynants retired as a member of the Board of Editors in 2010. On behalf of the Nuclear Fusion office and the Chairman of the Board, Mitsuru Kikuchi, I would like to thank him for his effort in support of the journal; Roger was one of the most active members of the Board and his balanced and competent advice was extremely valuable on many difficult decisions. At the same time we welcome Tony Donne whom I am sure does not need any introduction to the readers of Nuclear Fusion; I am confident he can only further the success of the journal.

The Nuclear Fusion office and IOP Publishing

Just as the journal depends on the authors and referees, so its success is also due to the tireless and largely unsung efforts of the Nuclear Fusion office in Vienna and IOP Publishing in Bristol. I would like to express my personal thanks to Maria Bergamini-Roedler, Katja Haslinger, Sophy Le Masurier, Yasmin McGlashan, Caroline Wilkinson, Sarah Ryder, Katie Gerrard and Stephanie Kent for the support that they have given to me, the authors and the referees.

Season's greetings

I would like to wish our readers, authors, referees and Board of Editors season's greetings and thank them for their contributions to Nuclear Fusion in 2010.