Dear members of the editorial board of Speech Communication,

I would like to ask you for advice and help on identifying suitable topics and guest editors for future special issues of our journal. As you know, special issues serve several important functions, including the dissemination of key ideas in emerging research areas, and they usually receive much attention by members of our community. Overview/review papers introducing the special issue tend to be among the most widely cited papers.

Speech Communication has two special issues in 2014, one on 'Processing under-resourced languages' (published as vol. 56), and one on 'Gesture and Speech in Interaction' (published as vol. 57). Currently, there are no other special issues in the pipeline.

If you are aware of hot topics or emerging research areas that you think would be suitable for special issues, please let me know. Let us all keep our eyes and ears open at the upcoming major conferences (ICASSP, EUSIPCO, Interspeech, etc.) and their special sessions and satellite workshops. Please be proactive in talking to possible guest editors. Feel free to nominate yourself as a guest editor.

For your convenience, I append a list of recent special issues of Speech Communication.

Please send your immediate suggestions by April 22 to my email address moebius@coli.uni-saarland.de, but please consider it as a continuous action item on all of us too.

Regards,

Bernd Moebius, EiC
Speech Communication