Founding Chief Editor Shaaban Khalil: Welcome to LHEP!

Dear colleagues,
It is with great pleasure that I welcome all of you to Letters in High Energy Physics (LHEP). By now, we have all witnessed how recent ground breaking discoveries in fundamental physics revolutionized and challenged our understanding of the universe at all length scales. New frontiers in beam energy and luminosity are pushing our experimental reach, validating old paradigms while posing new questions. The same scenario has played out on the cosmic scale. New and brave theoretical ideas are tying high energy physics to nearly all other disciplines in physics in the most novel and unexpected ways. The field is as alive and as vibrant as ever and it continues to attract the best and the brightest. On another front, the success of the open access model has revolutionized the world of academic publishing. In retrospect, this was all but inevitable. The appeal of universal unrestricted access to human knowledge is just overwhelming. Meanwhile, the information revolution is providing dramatically improved access, archiving, and indexing tools for all types of scholarly work.
In this atmosphere of excitement and transformation I, along with some friends and colleagues, felt the need for something new. We envisaged an outlet that captures the revolutionary, fast paced, and open nature of current research in high energy physics. A primarily electronic, open access journal in the form of short letters which report on summaries of important findings in the field seemed to capture our vision. After some hard work, LHEP is finally here!
On behalf of our editorial board, I want to address those constituencies without which no journal would exist, readers and authors. For our prospective readers, we promise to do our absolute best in order to offer you what has always been the lifeblood of real scientific progress: High quality, rigorously reviewed published research which informs and inspires. For our prospective authors, we assert our commitment to a fair and impartial review process. We will work hard to ensure that your published work with us is both visible and accessible to the academic community, as well as safely kept for perpetuity.
The creation of LHEP would not have been possible without its outstanding editorial board which is capable of making sure that every submitted manuscript is reviewed by a knowledgeable expert in the field and following through with fair decisions on publication. Recruiting members for LHEP's editorial board was such a pleasure. I take this opportunity to thank each of them for shouldering this responsibility. I also take this opportunity to thank the leadership of Andromeda, our publisher, for the trust invested in our board. It has been a pleasure working with you in order to bring LHEP into existence.


Shaaban Khalil
November, 2017