ROMS has made considerable progress in the last few months. As you can see from the current issue we continue to attract topical papers that are also at the cutting edge of research in marketing. I am hopeful that the flow of manuscripts will accelerate as the value of ROMS becomes clearer and its presence more widely known.

TWO IMPORTANT DEVELOPMENTS should help ROMS to achieve its goals quickly. First, I am pleased to announce that ROMS has entered into a Partner In Publishing arrangement with Marketing Research Network (MKTG), one of the sub-networks of the new Management Research Network (MRN) being launched by the Social Science Research Network (SSRN, http://www.ssrn.com/). MKTG, directed by Professor Al Silk of Harvard University is dedicated to increasing communication among marketing scholars, practitioners, and policy makers throughout the world. In the partnership that we envisage ROMS abstracts and working papers will be available for access through MKTG in addition to being available at the ROMS site. This will give wider access to the research appearing in ROMS, and also provide ROMS access to the very large subscriber base that SSRN enjoys. This is indeed an exciting prospect. I would like to thank Professor Michael Jensen of Harvard University, Chairman of the Board of Social Science Electronic Publishing, Inc and Professor Al Silk for making this possible.

SECOND, ROMS has decided that in addition to publishing long abstracts of original research, it will seek to publish full-length papers. These papers will be different from the papers that appear in the leading print journals. They will be topical, and the need for timely dissemination will be the key criterion for such papers. Authors will be encouraged to submit papers of broad interest to academia and practitioners. The papers might do one of several things: report original research, summarize the current state-of-the art in a topic area or raise research issues in need of greater attention by the community. We expect that full-length papers would appear starting in the second volume, in Fall 2002. While opening this new offering, ROMS will continue its focus on quick dissemination of the latest research by publishing long abstracts of papers that will be housed as part of the Working Paper Series. More details on the new offering appear in the current Call for Papers at the journal site.

THE USER BASE continues to show impressive growth. We now have 1200 users representing 73 countries. The manuscripts we have published to date should give potential authors a better idea of the kind of manuscripts we seek. I extend to all an invitation to submit your latest work that is under review at print journals, to ROMS.

DEBATE CORNER is an innovation recently introduced by ROMS. I am afraid it did not do as well as we had hoped. We will give it another try later this spring. Innovation is hard business, as everyone in Marketing knows. It is a question of learning what customers want. We at ROMS continue to try and learn that.