St Anne’s Academic Review 8 – 2018

Letter from the Editor
Alexandra Jamieson
STAAR 8 – October 2018, p. i

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Appearing in the eighth volume of the St Anne’s Academic Review (STAAR) are thirteen pieces from current or recent members of St Anne’s College, University of Oxford. This edition of STAAR includes articles from the humanities, sciences, and social sciences and features a themed section on the topic of New Horizons. This year we have included pieces from the JCR (Junior common Room) and SCR (Senior Common Room), in addition to the MCR (Middle Common Room). We are very proud to have expanded into accepting pieces from the whole college community and hope this will continue in future years.

 

STAAR has been through a number of transformations this year. Most notably this is the first year of peer review. All research articles and subject review pieces have been through a peer review process. In the online version the reviewer comments will be made available for download, in the spirit of open peer review. We are very pleased with how implementing this evaluation process has gone. I am very grateful to my team of editors who were enthusiastically behind inviting reviewers and handling the review process. It has been a great success with each article having at least one review and we have had 24 reviewers involved with STAAR this year.

 

This year we have eight articles under the topic of ‘New Horizons’. We chose this topic to explore how St Anne’s members are pushing the boundaries of research to further our understanding of the world. Andrew Briggs, Professor of Nanomaterials, nicely kicks off our delve into new horizons by discussing the advances in artificial intelligence and its impact on our lives. The rest of the articles are from a wide range of topics from 3-D printing to the rights of nature. This section also includes a short story which we hope you enjoy reading.

 

Up to now STAAR has relied on the generosity of the MCR for financial support. This year we ran a crowdfunding campaign supported by the college. I would like to thank everyone who donated funds to help STAAR grow as a journal and become more self-sustaining. The campaign would not have been possible without the help of a few key members of my editorial team. I wish to thank Valeria Taddei, Erin Hales and Shuchi Vora for helping me film the crowdfunding video and run the campaign, and Laiza Poletti for editing the video. Erin also was a big help with the social media campaign, running both the Twitter and Facebook account.

 

STAAR can now also count on the support of academic advisors Prof. Kate Watkins, Prof. Liora Lazarus and Prof. Simon Park, and on the editorial suggestions of Marcelo Zanon from Oxford University Press. We thank them for their availability and precious help in making STAAR ever more professional and widely read.

 

It was a pleasure to have worked alongside such a great team of editors. It has been a joy and I offer my sincerest gratitude to all. They maintained academic integrity throughout and were committed to ensuring the eighth volume of STAAR was a success. Additionally, I am thankful to Valeria Taddei for always being there to discuss ideas and for her commitment to the role of Production and Web Design Manager.

 

It has been a pleasure to serve as the Editor in Chief.
I hope you enjoy reading our eighth issue of STAAR.

 

Sincerely,
Alex Jamieson

 
Creative Commons License
Letter from the Editor by Alexandra Jamieson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
 

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St Anne's Academic Review (STAAR)
A Publication by St Anne's College Middle Common Room
ISSN 2048-2566 (Online)  ISSN 2515-6527 (Print)