2 Università di Bologna.pdfVIP

4OR manuscript No. (will be inserted by the editor) 4OR: Year 4 Editorial notes Denis Bouyssou1 , Silvano Martello2 , Frank Plastria3 1 CNRS 2 Universit`a di Bologna 3 Vrije Universiteit Brussel Three years ago, we were writing in the editorial notes inserted in the first issue of this journal (see Bouyssou et al., 2003) that “Starting a new journal is a challenge”. It was. But three years after its launching, 4OR is still there. . . and appears to be in reasonably good condition. Indeed: – we have been in position to consistently follow our publishing pace of 4 issues of approximately 85 pages a year; – the journal now has an electronic edition available at http://link. springer.de/link/service/journals/10288/index.htm and is part of the new electronic package deal offered by Springer to libraries. This will undoubtedly increase the number of readers of the papers that we publish; – the growing international impact of the journal was reflected by a change in its name. Whereas it was “4OR, Quarterly Journal of the Belgian, French and Italian Operations Research Societies”, starting with Issue 2 of Volume 3, it is now “4OR, A Quarterly Journal of Operations Re- search”, a change that was approved by Springer and the three promot- ing societies. Our term of three years as editors ended in December 2005. We thought this was an appropriate time to give our readers information on the first LAMSADE, Universit´e Paris Dauphine, Place du Mar´echal de Lattre de Tassigny, F-75775 Paris Cedex 16, France, tel: +33 1 44 05 48 98, fax: +33 1 44 05 40 91, e-mail: 4or@lamsade.dauphine.fr. DEIS, Universit`a di Bologna, Viale Risorgimento 2, 40136 Bologna, Italy tel: +39 051 2093022, fax: +39 051 2093073, e-mail: 4or@deis.unibo.it. MOSI,