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Editor's Note
Homa Katouzian
Available online: 13 Dec 2010

To cite this article: Homa Katouzian (2011): Editor's Note, Iranian Studies, 44:1, 1-2
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00210862.2011.525699

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Iranian Studies, volume 44, number 1, January 2011

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Editors Note
Iranian Studies: Six Issues a Year

From January 2011 Iranian Studies will be published six times a year.
I was made Editor by the ISIS Council, meeting in the MESA conference in
Anchorage in November 2003, when the SIS was renamed the International
Society for Iranian Studies. The rst issue I published was volume 37, number
1, January 2004. Six years on, many lessons have been learned, signicant
progress has been made, and more progress is hoped for.
To mark the fortieth anniversary of the foundation of the Society and the
Journal in 1967, our publishers, Routledge of Taylor and Francis, suggested
that we might consider increasing the frequency of publication from four to
ve times a year. Having reassured the then ISIS President (Nasrin Rahimieh)
and Council that the editorial team were willing and able to do so without a
drop in the journals quality, they agreed with the publishers suggestion, and
thus we began to publish ve issues from 2007.
There were two principal considerations: that the editorial team would be able
and willing to put up the additional effort required for publishing a fth issue
every year; and that the increase in numbers would not adversely affect the
standards of the articles published. In fact we are frequently told by our
colleagues and readers that, contrary to such understandable concerns, the
quality of the material published has distinctly improved since. Incidentally, it
may be also worth recalling that the Societys and Journals fortieth anniversary
was celebrated in an international conference on Iranian studies in the twentieth
century, convened by Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi and me, at the University of
Toronto in October 2007, most of the proceedings of which were later published
in the Journal.
The original contract between us and the publishers having fallen due for
renewal, Mohamad (ISIS President, 2008 10) and I negotiated a new contract,
as part of whichonce again at the publishers initial suggestionwe agreed
to increase the publication frequency to six issues from the current year. The
publishers suggestion, the editorial teams acceptance, and the ISIS Councils
endorsement were in large measure a witness to the Journals growing success,
and, in particular, showed the great condence which the editorial teams
work enjoys by all concerned. At the same time, and aside from being the international agship of Iranian studies, Iranian Studies is now by far the most
frequently published journal in the eld in any language.
The number and quality of articles we have received, and special issues we
have invited or approved, have been systematically increasing all these years,
and this inevitably made it difcult to publish them as soon as we would have
ISSN 0021-0862 print/ISSN 1475-4819 online/11/010001 2
#2011 The International Society for Iranian Studies
DOI 10.1080/00210862.2011.525699

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2 Editors Note

wished. Authors, whether of articles or book reviews, understandably wish their

works, once approved, to be published soon thereafter. It would please the
potential contributors and reviewers to know that the further increase in the publication frequency will now enable us to publish more articles, reviews and special
issues more quickly than before. Above all we look forward to receiving more of
the best research products of members of the Society and the whole profession,
and promise to provide a service which will not be surpassed by any other journal
in the eld.
It remains for me to express my sincere thanks and appreciation to our
publishers for the most friendly, cooperative, and efcient way with which
they help us in the publication of the journal, and to Dominic Brookshaw and
Hossein Shahidi (Assistant Editors), and Roham Alvandi, Rivanne Sandler and
Cyrus Schayegh (Book Review Editors), without whose invaluable support it
would not have been possible to reach this stage.
And, nally, as Sadi might have put it: We told the story at length, and yet it
goes on (Hekayat in hameh goftim o hamchenan baqist).
Homa Katouzian
January 2011