About the Editor and Goals for Journal

James T. Herbert, Ph.D. is Professor-in-charge of Rehabilitation Services at The Pennsylvania State University. For the past 23 years, Jim has worked as a rehabilitation counselor educator teaching undergraduate and graduate students. Effective January 2007, he was appointed to a four-year term as Editor of Rehabilitation Education (RE). Earlier, Jim had served as Co-editor of RE during 1993-1997. As Editor, his major goals are to:

1. Interface with an established electronic platform that authors and reviewers can use to submit and review manuscripts. Effective March 2007, a new platform through Manuscript Central was implemented. Authors and reviewers are able to review the status of manuscripts by visiting: http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/re.
   
2. Provide constructive reviews to authors. Authors, particularly new scholars, benefit from receiving specific information regarding content. As writing for publication is an acquired skill, there are basic proven techniques that can aid in producing useful and relevant publications for the field. An outline of these techniques and a checklist of questions authors should consider before manuscript submission provided in the accompanying "Journal Site" links. Additional information is provided in an editorial in Volume 21, Issue #2, pages 71-72 in Rehabilitation Education.
   
3. Provide instructive feedback to RE Editorial Board members regarding their performance in an effort to improve timely and constructive feedback to authors. Editorial Board members and ad hoc reviewers assigned to manuscripts will receive copies of each others’ reviews as well as the final disposition letter sent to the first author (with identifying author information deleted). In this way, reviewers will be able to evaluate their individual reviews within the context of how other reviews were written. In instances where reviewer remediation is needed to provide constructive reviews to authors, the Editor will assist accordingly.
   
4. Provide timely reviews to authors and assigned reviewers regarding their written evaluations. Once a manuscript has been entered into the Manuscript Central database, all authors should receive a final disposition regarding the publication status within 60 days. Similarly, assigned reviewers will receive copies of each other’s reviews within this time period or within 7 days of the last received review, whichever date comes first.
   
5. Produce one Special Topics Issue each year that is approved by the NCRE Executive Board. This issue will be assigned for the fourth issue of each year. Specific guidelines to a Special Issues proposal have been developed and can be found at: Guidelines for submitting special topics issue.