Orchestra!

This issue sees off three years of my serving, from 2016 to 2018, as editor-in-chief of EASTS. As I did when I started, I would like to thank all our authors, reviewers, and editorial team—in the past three years, together we have proudly presented cutting-edge scholarship in individual papers and thematic issues from issue 10.3 to 12.4. My particular thanks go to associate editors Hee-Je Bak, Francesca Bray, Michael Fischer, Sean Hsiang-lin Lei, and Togo Tsukahara, for their generous support. Without them, this journal would not have developed into what it now is.

Special thanks also go to Professor Honghong Tinn, convener of the book review editorial board from 2012 to 2018. In her long and excellent service, Professor Tinn successfully secured high-quality reviews, making East Asian books more accessible to English readers. In some reviews she invited alternative perspectives, not always Asian but definitely stimulating, to mainstream scholarship. We are grateful indeed for her efforts and are delighted that she will be staying with us on the editorial team. It is also a pleasure to have Professor Jia-shin Chen, who joined the team as a book review editor in 2016, to take on this challenging job. Both will be writing in this issue: Professor Tinn summarizes her achievement, and Professor Chen envisions the future of book reviews at EASTS.

This issue also opens another term of my editorship. While writing this note, I could not help remembering the 1990s landmark television series Orchestra!,¹ which very much suited its title. Just as if EASTS were an orchestra, my wish is that every season subscribers are able to enjoy a refreshing opening concert with great music and a program of what the orchestra will be doing in the year to come. But Orchestra! has additional layers of meaning. The series was produced when classical music had already become rather obsolete for a new generation of music lovers. The orchestra in question both represented this artistic form while inspiring new works created for it. It was thus a means of bringing a musical tradition to existing concertgoers while also expanding its ability to communicate to an emerging audience. In the title Orchestra!, the exclamation mark is all-important. The maestro Sir George Solti was joined by actor and comedian Dudley Moore, who was also an accomplished pianist, to host the show. Proudly entertaining, they not only introduced the instrumental sections of a symphony orchestra but also highlighted varieties of classical music via these, from classics like Bach's Brandenburg Concertos to contemporary jewels such as Witold Lutosławski's Third Symphony.

Just like the Orchestra! series, the thrilling reading experience and the sense of intellectual togetherness in STS are what EASTS hopes to bring to its readers. As discussed in the "EASTS in Conversation" forum at the 2018 Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) meeting, the academic journal is an age-old business facing the challenge of survival in the information world. While managing content and format to reach a sizable audience, editors have to pay equal attention to the sustainability, both financially and scholarly, of the journals they are running. Fortunately, the unconditional support of Taiwan's Ministry of Science and Technology and our longstanding partnership with Duke University Press allow EASTS to focus more on the networking of meaningful STS in and for East Asia, the task we have been undertaking since our inception.

As I wrote in the editor's note for issue 11.3, in our first decade EASTS gradually broadened out to new disciplines and territories via networks of scholars and societies, something which we appreciate deeply. We believe that this organic, growing network is the main reason for readers to enjoy this young journal, and we are glad that the 4S recognized these efforts when EASTS was awarded the 2018 Infrastructure Award. Meanwhile, we have also been informed that, starting from our 2016 issues, our content is to be indexed and abstracted in the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI) and the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI). We anticipate that a growing number of authors, especially...