FROM THE EDITOR

Welcome to the year 2000 and our updated Swine Health and Production design. We began planning these changes to the journal in September. Ruth Cronje (the Associate Editor), Eileen Kuhlmann (the Managing Editor), and I began by making a list of all of the changes we wanted to see. We sent our list to Dave Brown (the Publications Editor), who added his suggestions and then began making mock proofs. After several iterations, we settled on the current design.

The aim of the journal has always been to communicate new scientific knowledge to the AASP members in a manner that enhances the reader's understanding while reducing the amount of time taken by the reader to garner the information. For this reason, we have moved to a three-column format, which should increase your reading speed. It will also reduce the number of pages required for the same amount of information, which will lower our printing costs. There are other smaller changes, such as placing figure captions above the figure, designed to improve your access to the information we publish. We sincerely hope that these changes have improved the quality and readability of your journal. I appreciate the extra time and effort required of everyone, particularly Dave, to create this new design. We are fortunate to have such a dedicated staff working on SHAP.

We are fortunate, also, to have the dedication of our hard-working Editorial Board. The main function of the editorial board is to maintain the scientific rigor of the journal. These people are a generous group who volunteer hours of their time to review manuscripts, summarize the response from all of the reviewers, and then make decisions about whether or not a manuscript is of sufficient quality and also of sufficient usefulness to the audience to recommend publication in SHAP. The Editorial Board is also responsible for policy decisions at SHAP. In September, for example, the Editorial Board voted to take the nonrefereed citations out of the body of the manuscripts. We discourage the use of nonrefereed publications, such as proceedings papers. However, there are times when these represent the only available resource for the material being cited. To distinguish these papers from those in refereed publications, we will now print them in a separate category within the references. Further details about this change can be found in our author guidelines on the SHAP website: http://www.aasp.org/shap/guidelines/.

In September, the Editorial Board also discussed using a standard alphanumeric nomenclature for swine management systems, as was suggested by the Drs. Harris. The decision of the board was to convert all terminology into a plain English equivalent. The editorial staff will work to remove terms such as "SEW" and "multisite" and replace these with words that clearly describe the management of the pigs. We have readers around the world and the editorial board believes that this policy will enhance the comprehensibility of the manuscript for all readers

I would like to thank the current Editorial Board members, past members of the Editorial Board, and all of our reviewers for their dedication to the AASP and to our profession as a whole. In the meantime, we hope you appreciate the new SHAP format; if you'd like, please drop us a line and let us know what you think!

-- Cate Dewey