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In the year 2011, the relatively young field of multimedia information retrieval had succeeded in progressing from a handful of special sessions at computer vision and multimedia conferences to having its own central flagship conference—The ACM International Conference on Multimedia Retrieval (ICMR). This marked an important point because we now had a flagship conference where we could publish and know that our work would be seen by the appropriate audience.

However, at the time there were no journals which focused on multimedia information retrieval so the papers tended to get submitted to a plethora of diverse journals in topics such as pattern recognition, signal processing, image-processing and multimedia. So, at the conference level, there was a good central publishing venue, but nothing at the journal level.

Numerous discussions with the multimedia information retrieval community resulted in the logical next step in 2012, that is, a journal which was by and for the multimedia information retrieval community, the International Journal of Multimedia Information Retrieval (IJMIR). The editorial board was chosen carefully from people who had been program chairs of the leading conferences in this area, had deep expertise in the different areas in multimedia retrieval and had shown a long-term commitment to the improvement and evolution of the community.

Starting a new journal is a challenging task. It has similar aspects as starting a new conference in that you are not sure beforehand how many people will show up—what the level of interest will be and also what the overall response will be from the scientific community. In addition to having triple-peer review and a high- quality bar, we had an additional goal of making the journal more responsive. It was well known at the time that the top journals in computer science took about 200–350 days from the submission date until the first decision. We also knew that the top journals in the sciences (e.g. Nature and Science) were much faster, on the order of 30–60 days, so we knew it was possible to do better. So, we set a goal of having an average time of less than 4 months or 120 days. According to the Springer statistics, our journal (IJMIR) has an average time to first decision of only 43 days.

Regarding submissions, in 2014 and 2015, we received 86 and 92 submissions, respectively with an average acceptance rate over the 2 years of 20.8 %. (Note that because there are some papers which have not received a final decision at the time of writing, the acceptance rate can vary slightly.)

Another important aspect of IJMIR is having an eye on the important and emerging themes in our field and setting up special issues to address these themes. In 2014 (vol. 3, iss. 3), we had the special issue on cross-media analysis organized by Zhongfei Zhang, Yueting Zhang, Ramesh Jain and Jia-Yu Pan. From the editorial, “Cross-media analysis is a research area in the general field of multimedia content analysis that focuses on the exploitation of the data with different modalities from multiple sources simultaneously and synergistically to discover knowledge and understand the world.”

In 2015 (vol. 4, iss. 2), a special issue on the theme of concept detection with big data was organized by Shih-Fu Chang, Thomas S. Huang, Michael S. Lew and Bart Thomee. From the editorial, “By exploiting big data, the current generation of algorithms has contributed and developed both advances in accuracy and computational efficiency as well as new paradigms and techniques in concept detection.”

From discussions with the authors and reviewers, there is a great need for surveys short or long which cover important topics both fundamental and emerging. I will be making an effort to find appropriate experts to address this point.

I would like to thank all of the editorial boards who have given significant time and effort in achieving our goals. Any journal is only as strong as the community which supports it. IJMIR has been lucky to have an energetic, positive and thriving community and in the end, that is the main reason for our success.

My goal is to keep the journal in touch with the current trends, most promising research directions and needs of the community and so I look forward to continuing discussions with our active researchers to see what opportunities there are for the journal to assist the community in general.