Editorial
Authors: Gütl Christian 
Published: January 2025

Dear Readers,&nbsp;

I would like to wish you all the best for the new year! It is with great pleasure that I welcome you to our first regular issue in 2025 with a pleasant new achievement. The journal has successfully exceeded 30 years and is still available to authors and readers without interruption. I would like to gratefully acknowledge the visionary ideas of Prof. Hermann Maurer, who founded the journal and successfully managed it for many years, preparing the ground for it to become one of the longest-running open content journals in computer science. Starting with this issue in the new year, we are very pleased to be part of the KOALA Computer Science Cluster from TIB - Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology University Library, Germany. We have also changed our license to CC BY, and future special issues will also be free of charge because of the KOALA funding.&nbsp;

Looking back on the past year, we have further increased our visibility and taken steps to fully comply with the Diamond Open Content Standard and align our journal with the KOALA requirements. Thanks to the combined efforts of the Pensoft team and the J.UCS publishing team, we are listed and indexed in more than 40 indexing services worldwide, including DOAJ, Web of Science, and Scopus. The increased visibility and social media presence have also led to a further increase in page views and article downloads. With around 120,000 unique views, reader interest in J.UCS publications increased by 20% compared to the previous year. We can also look back on an increasing number of submitted articles and special issue proposals. This interest is reflected in a notable impact factor with a Scopus Cite Score of 2.2 and a Web of Science Journal Impact Factor of 0.7. We proudly look back on a total of 13 issues - 12 regular and 1 special issue - with 78 articles by 256 authors from 45 countries on novel aspects of various computer science topics. The acceptance rate has fallen to below 15 per cent.&nbsp;

These great achievements were only possible thanks to the commitment and interest of the community and the valuable support of the Editorial Board and financial supporters of J.UCS. In 2024, we welcomed 19 new members to the Editorial Board, bringing our total number of Editorial Board members to 211. We would also like to gratefully acknowledge the support of 33 guest reviewers over the past year. &nbsp;

In particular, I would like to thank Dr. Ulrike Krie&szlig;mann from the Library of the Graz University of Technology, the TIB - Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology University Library in Germany, and the Institute of Interactive Systems and Data Science from TU Graz for their financial support. &nbsp;

I would also like to thank the J.UCS team, Johanna Zeisberg for taking care of the publication process, David Kerschbaumer for his social media support, and Sebastian G&uuml;rtl and Alexander Nussbaumer for their technical support, as well as Pensoft Publishers Ltd. for hosting our journal.&nbsp;

I look forward to continuing to work with our editors, editorial team and technical support to maintain the success of J.UCS. I would be very grateful for suggestions and feedback on how we can improve and develop J.UCS in the future. We also greatly appreciate the generous support of the J.UCS community, especially in promoting the journal and citing relevant articles in their research papers.&nbsp;

In this regular issue, I am very pleased to present 5 accepted articles by 16 authors from 7 different countries, namely Algeria, China, India, Ireland, Spain, Tunisia, and Turkiye.&nbsp;

Emre &Ouml;nal and Abdullah B&uuml;lb&uuml;l from Turkiye cover in their research a computational game unit balancing approach based on game theory to make each game unit equally preferable against a uniform play strategy. Ruchika Malhotra and Madhukar Cherukuri from India look in their research into Software Defect Categorization (SDC) models and apply convolutional neural networks in their empirical study. Song Yu, Bugao Jiang, Danni Zhang, and Zhifang Liao from China address in their research a cross-community question relevance prediction model, CCQRP, to predict the relevance of Stack Overflow questions and GitHub issues and recommend relevant GitHub issues. In a collaboration between researchers from Algeria and Tunesia, Soraya Setti Ahmed, Yahya Slimani and Riadh Frefita report their research on a fault tolerance model for the Hadoop Distributed System. In a collaboration between researchers form Spain and Ireland, Francisco Dominguez-Mateos, Vincent O&rsquo;Brien, James Garland, Ryan Furlong, and Daniel Palacios-Alonso present their research on zero-shot learning for sub-discrimination in pre-trained models to differentiate several attributes such as gender, age, and skin tone, without any additional training.

Enjoy Reading!

Best wishes,

Christian G&uuml;tl, Managing Editor-in-Chief

Graz University of Technology, Graz, Austria