ACI Avances en Ciencias e Ingenierías in 2022

This past year, we have achieved various milestones with the journal ACI Avances en Ciencias e Ingenierías. In this editorial, I would like to list these achievements to celebrate the advances obtained in 2022.

As you may have noticed as a reader, we have redesigned the website of ACI Avances en Ciencias e Ingenierías. We have provided various additional resources for our readers and prospective authors on this new website, including a document template for articles and various tutorials. We have improved the clarity of our guidelines for prospective authors and rearranged information so that it is more accessible to the readers.

Within the online platform of the journal, we are now up to date with the latest version of OJS, the Open Journal Systems. As such, we have been able to solve a number of technical problems that the journal experienced in the past. In addition, we have enhanced the experience for our reviewers by improving the Spanish version and creating an English version of our review form.

Various of our editors have taken on new leadership roles within Universidad San Francisco de Quito USFQ and are no longer available to serve on the editorial board of ACI Avances en Ciencias e Ingenierías. I would like to extend my gratitude to them for their service over these years on the editorial board and wish them all the best in the next steps in their careers. I would also like to thank those who have volunteered to fill these vacancies and look forward to their input and contributions to the journal.

ACI Avances en Ciencias e Ingenierías also successfully collaborated with Red Latinoamericana del Maíz. We received selected manuscripts from participants to this event, collaborated with the scientific committee for the peer review of these papers, and published the papers under our policies for copyediting and layout.

Ultimately, we also ran the first edition of the #StudentAwards of ACI Avances en Ciencias e Ingenierías. Current and former students from Universidad San Francisco de Quito USFQ were invited to contribute a research paper to these awards. After peer review, the accepted papers were evaluated and ranked by the editors of the journal, and a winner in the categories of undergraduate and graduate students was selected. We rounded off this first edition with an event on the USFQ campus to celebrate the two winning students as well as to celebrate the research contributions of our student community.

2023 promises to be another exciting year for the journal. We are hosting the second edition of the #StudentAwards and are sourcing papers related to the impact of climate change in Ecuador and sustainable solutions for the future of our country. Behind the scenes, we are working on obtaining further indexations for the journal, and we continue to work on improving the experiences for all our users.

To round off, I would like to thank all those who form part of the community of ACI Avances en Ciencias e Ingenierías. Many thanks to our readers, as you are the reason for our existence as a journal. Many thanks to our authors, for contributing your knowledge and insights to this journal. Many thanks to all reviewers, for your time, effort, and technical expertise that have improved the articles and, thus, the journal. Many thanks to the editors, for your tireless work in managing the abstracts. Many thanks to USFQ Press, the publishing house behind this journal, for your continuous technical and administrative support to the journal. And, last but not least, many thanks to the authorities of USFQ, for financially and morally supporting the work of this journal so that we can publish open access articles without charging the authors, as well as for supporting the events of the journal.