During this time of COVID-19, in the solitude of our home offices, we have all come to appreciate the value of well-written papers, ones that can be understood without the assistance of proximate presenters who can respond straightaway to requests for additional explanations and clarifications. Conference proceedings are certainly essential sources of information to engineers and scientists, but they are, by their nature, often brief and short on detail. In contrast, journal articles, unlike conference proceedings papers, are subjected to thorough peer-review, a process in which authors are frequently asked to improve the clarity of sections of their papers that are not easily understood. A journal such as JM³ is therefore important to the technical community that is served.

Determining what technical community should be targeted by a particular journal is not black-and-white. Journals with too narrow a technical focus will have limited appeal, even to specialists, who often want to understand their own work in the context of related technology. On the other hand, if a journal’s scope is too broad, it becomes difficult for its editorial staff to have strong engagement across the full breadth of the community it is meant to serve. In recent years it has become increasingly evident that the scope of JM³ is too broad to be well-supported by a single editorial board. For this reason, it was decided that the technical communities currently served by this journal will soon be supported by two journals, the Journal of Optical Microsystems (JOM) and the Journal of Micro/Nanopatterning, Materials, and Metrology, which will retain the acronym JM³. This change was announced in April ( https://www.spie.org/news/spie-to-launch-new-journal-of-optical-microsystems-in-january-and-jm3-to-be-renamed). The transition to split these journals has begun and will be completed by year-end 2020.

Hans Zappe will become Editor-in-Chief of JOM, which will be the first publication dedicated to the overlap between the microsystems and optics fields. Focusing on micro-optical engineering, optical MEMS and MOEMS as well as the science and engineering of miniaturized and integrated photonic and optical systems, the new journal will address the entire spectrum, from fundamentals to applications, of the optical microsystems field.

The JOM editorial board will consist of some past JM³ MOEMS editors and a few new faces:

Harry Levinson will become Editor-in-Chief of the renamed journal, Journal of Micro/Nanopatterning, Materials, and Metrology, which will focus on patterning technologies for features at submicron feature sizes. With EUV lithography now in use in high-volume manufacturing, there are many new and interesting lithographic challenges for process control, materials, metrology, integration, and extensions to future nodes. Topical areas covered include:

The following is a list of the senior and associate editors who work to ensure that the papers published in JM³ are high quality and of interest to the lithography community.

With this envisioned split into two journals, it is our overarching goal to provide our respective scientific and engineering communities with top-quality publications on cutting-edge research in our areas of expertise. Building on the solid foundation established by prior Editors-in-Chief Burn Lin and Chris Mack, and with the support of our editorial boards and SPIE staff, we aim to establish two new pillars in optics publications and thereby continue the legacies of our predecessors.