The papers in this issue of Palaeontologia Electronica are published in honor of vertebrate palaeontologist William R. Downs, III, who died in December 2002. This issue contains 28 articles, making it the largest issue of PE yet; by comparison, we published 64 papers in the 14 previous issues combined. Our four guest editors (see next Editorial) not only assembled the papers, but took them through peer review and did the initial editing for style.
The success of the Downs Issue has pushed our limits. Jennifer Rumford, our Managing Editor who works for PE alongside her normal duties at the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP), converts each paper from a set of document and image files to the HTML and PDF pages seen on our site. She also makes the proof-stage corrections demanded by authors and editors. Normally Jennifer handles four to eight papers in between issues; this time she has handled twenty-eight, several of which have an unusual number of complicated graphics. Jennifer has worked tirelessly on this issue and moved it along at a remarkable pace. The magnitude of Jennifer’s job is illustrated by the 662 individual e-mail messages in our inbox for this issue alone – most of those messages are communications to or from Jennifer (all of them entertaining and important). Neither this issue, nor any issue of PE would be possible without her.
Beverly Gracia, our copyeditor, has also risen to
the challenge. She has been inundated by paper after paper, and worked with
Jennifer to ensure that the issue was assembled in the same period that we would
normally process a small handful of papers.
And not least, we would like to thank our translators, who volunteer their linguistic abilities to translate PE abstracts into five different languages, stoking the international spirit of paleontology. This work goes on behind the scenes, with abstracts dropped on the translators after the proof stage, just before the issue goes to press. Imagine their delight to get twenty-eight abstracts in their inbox. Our team of translators includes Michel Chartier (French), Alessandra Curtotti (Italian), Martin Dubreuil (French), Ashraf Elewa (Arabic), Alessandro Grippo, (Italian), Franck Guy (German), Franziska Grossmann (German), Marcos Lamolda (Spanish), Liu Liping (Chinese), Hanli Liu (Chinese), Jesús E. Caracuel Martín (Spanish), Sebastian Meier (German), Jin Meng (Chinese), Paul Palmqvist (Spanish), Tim Patterson (Oral Abstracts), Michael Schlirf (German), Xiaoming Wang (Chinese), and Zhaoqun Zhang (Chinese).
If you are interested in helping bring PE to non-English readers, we are looking for additional volunteer translators. Despite the large number of languages, we are missing several spoken by many paleontologists, including Russian and Portuguese. In the meantime, from all of us at PE, we say…
Whitey Hagadorn & P. David Polly
Executive Editors
PE Editorial Number: 8.1.1E
Copyright: Coquina Press May 2005