Foreword Guest editors &amp; Full Issue
Authors:   Waygate Technologies, Würschig Thomas ,   Baker Hughes, Herrera Roberto Henry ,   Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), Camerini Cesar Giron ,   Politecnico di Torino, Canova Aldo ,   Politecnico di Milano, Carboni Michele ,   Pusan National University, Cho Younho ,   Kaunas University of Technology (KTU), Jasiūnienė Elena ,   University of Cassino and Southern Lazio, Tamburrino Antonello ,   Vaal University of Technology (VUT), Sikakana Qhubekani Ike 
Published: January 2025

<br>Dear readers

<br><br>

It is a great pleasure to present you with this new issue of the peer-reviewed and open access Research and Review Journal of Nondestructive Testing (ReJNDT). ‘'Frontiers in Nondestructive Testing and Evaluation: Academic Insights (2022/23)' is the first issue, which is dedicated explicitly to young talents graduating in the field of non-destructive testing and evaluation (NDT&E). The main goal is to present their work to a wider audience, both in academia and industry. When I came up with this idea less than one year ago, it was mostly triggered by the observation that we need to do much more to identify, attract and keep young talents – and there are many of them – in our field. Among others, one of the obvious gaps to do so is the rather poor support in particular at their early career. And undoubtedly much stronger interaction between academics and industry is needed to improve this situation. In this context, we developed a unique concept: Giving graduates an opportunity to publish their thesis work as corresponding author in an international, peer-reviewed journal, open access and free of charge. Another unique point beyond is the idea to bring together, respectively, one expert from academics and one from industry as reviewers. To address many of the challenges of the peer-review process, we chose to use an innovative approach in academic publishing Open peer review.<br>

What did we achieve? From the beginning, we were impressed by the positive feedback from the NDT community worldwide.

As a first result, this helped us to form a strong editorial board with members from seven countries, including the president of the WCNDT 2024. In the following months it was amazing to see how the initial idea of this issue was filled with life. Each new submission and the vivid open review solidified the conceptual frame and gave us more and more confidence that we were on the right way.

Finally, we end up with eight contributions from five countries and authors originating from Canada, France, Germany, Iran, Italy and Poland. As we addressed the call to Master and PhD students, it is remarkable that we also ended up exactly with an equal number for both, respectively. Besides, the articles cover a wide range of NDT&E topics: From Ultrasonic testing, X-ray, magnetic flux and visual to NDT4.0 and structural health monitoring. Taking into account that we “started from zero”, these results are very encouraging.

Therefore, I would like to make some acknowledgements. My and our first acknowledgment goes to the authors for their valuable work. This success is YOUR success! Undoubtedly, the quality of the papers was significantly improved by the careful and supportive reviews, which were thoroughly implemented in the final revisions. We are very grateful for the support of the reviewers, in particular as we know that all of them did it in their sparse free time and just based on the enthusiasm for this project. At the end, I would also like to thank all members of the editorial board for our very efficient cooperation.<br>

Altogether, combining authors, reviewers, and members of the editorial board we could unify NDT talents and experts from 14 countries, representing industry and academia and distributed over ALL (!) continents. The global acceptance of our concept just underlines that we, as NDT community, need to work together to tackle the future challenges. Therefore, we hope that the impressive outcome of this issue is just the beginning of a great journey. And we are looking forward to future contributions as a continuation of this first issue.<br>

But for now: Clear the stage for the Master and PhD work of the academic year 2022-2023! The articles of our young talents shall be in the spotlight, giving a glimpse of the variety of interesting and excellent thesis out there. Each of them a little diamond. The presentation here may be just a little step for now, but hopefully a big step for their future and the NDT community in general. In that sense: Enjoy reading, like I did!<br>

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Kind regards,<br>

Dr. Thomas Würschig<br>

In the name of the editorial board.