Announcements

We would like to send warm wishes from the Editor-in-Chief of Entropy and look to the future. Acknowledgement of our past achievements provides the strongest stimulus for future endeavor.

As the journal Entropy enters its 20th year, one cannot help but reflect not only on how far the journal has come, but also on how far the field has come. I have been Editor-in-Chief of Entropy for the past six years, which is roughly one-third of the lifetime of the journal. While my predecessors did an excellent job in establishing the journal, I am grateful to have had the opportunity to help it grow. On my arrival in 2012, Entropy had an impact factor of 1.183. This last year, 2017, the impact factor reached a respectable 1.821 and it promises to break 2.0 in the next year or so, as Entropy continues its rapid growth.

I have been an active member of the MaxEnt (Bayesian Inference and Maximum Entropy Methods in Science and Engineering) community since I first attended the MaxEnt 1997 workshop over twenty years ago, just before the birth of the journal Entropy. My MaxEnt colleagues had long been concerned about the fact that there were few precious journals that would entertain their research papers for publication. Historically, the MaxEnt community has been known for being about a decade or so ahead of its time. While this is an exciting position to be in, it is extremely difficult from a pragmatic perspective, since it is common for the scientific community to undervalue or, worse, to misunderstand our work. We continue to encounter some of these difficulties at Entropy, since it is still frequent for the scientific community to think of entropy as a thermodynamic quantity rather than a tool for making inferences. Fortunately, as the journal continues to grow, the number of those who understand entropy grows.

I was delighted to take the helm of Entropy in 2012. I had access to a large circle of excellent scientists who had much to contribute and could profit from a growing journal with a scope to accommodate their work! Contribute they did. But I was astonished to discover so many other people out there who were applying entropic concepts to their problems. I was, and still am, excited to learn of new applications and advances and I am grateful that Entropy is in an excellent and respected position to present and showcase them.

— Prof. Dr. Kevin Knuth
Editor-in-Chief of Entropy

To celebrate the recent milestones, we have established a few Special Issues to look back over 20 years of outstanding accomplishments and to highlight innovative frontier research perspectives. We encourage you to keep an eye on the publications in these Special Issues and hope you consider them as a venue for publishing your latest work.

• "20th Anniversary of Entropy - Approximate and Sample Entropy" (guest editor: Prof. Dr. Roberto Hornero)
• "20th Anniversary of Entropy - Recent Advances in Entropy and Information-Theoretic Concepts and Their Applications" (guest editor: Prof. Dr. Raúl Alcaraz Martínez)