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eJSS is now two years old! Here at the JSS publishing office, we’re delighted to celebrate this birthday, and to thank all the authors and contributors who have ventured with us into this uncharted territory. Most of all, we’d like to thank our readers, and especially those who have contacted us to say how much they now like the electronic publication, long after their initial skepticism and cries of “it can’t be done.” It can, it has, and we’re so very pleased!
Over the past two years, we’ve worked hard to establish the credentials of eJSS, and our staff members have spent many long hours finding new ways to bring it
more in line with the standards of the print edition. Beginning with this issue, you’ll see individual and very creative covers that reflect the issue’s content. You’ll soon
see new ways to take advantage of full color, interactive features and other things that the print edition lacks. Above all, you’ll see a wide range of new authors and topics,
reflecting our worldwide circulation and expanded readership.
This issue presents a new article by three distinguished authors from Braunschweig, Germany, focusing on
quantifying risk in the railway industry. Clif Ericson’s “Clif’s Notes” also deals with risk, and with the merits of quantitative vs. qualitative analysis. Charlie Hoes’ “TBD”
offers insights into the risks of narrow-focused viewpoints in system safety. Indeed, this issue is all about risk, whether an article specifically references that topic or
not. After all, by publishing in eJSS, we’ve opened ourselves up to the entire world — and yes, that involves some risk.
However, as we old-timers know all too
well, if someone is determined to plagiarize our work, they will manage to do it. These days, it’s just as easy to optical-scan the text from a printed document as to copy it
from the Web — easier, perhaps, as a good Web programmer can embed code to make copy/pasting more trouble than it’s worth. Ditto for the ease of photocopying printed articles,
whiting-out names, etc., and it will be a lot harder to find the person handing out paper copies than the one re-publishing a Web document that is subject to a keyword search.
And yes, electronic publishing can put our work before the eyes of people who don’t subscribe to the print edition, or who may not even have heard of it. But isn’t that really
a good thing? Overall, it seems that the greatest risk is that of exposing many new people to the tenets of system safety, along with new ideas on making systems safer. Isn’t
that a risk worth taking?
If you’ve never published in eJSS, please send us your articles. Join us as we dispense with the stereotypes and continue to venture into the most modern trends in publishing. After all, if we system safety professionals won’t break new ground, are we truly doing our jobs?
Happy birthday, eJSS! With each issue, may you continue to make the System Safety Society even more proud.
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