Welcome to the official blog of the International Journal of Fracture! You may remember the days when we had to wait for the printed copy of journals to show up physically at a nearby library; now archival information comes to us through a cable (and increasingly on wireless) connection. Old volumes of journals are getting converted to digital form for easy retrieval; for example, all back volumes of the International Journal of Fracture are now available in electronic form. Now we can browse the treasures of the archive with ease from practically anywhere. However, the information flow is unidirectional and somewhat static since we are just at the beginning of the digital information age. We have merely altered the mode of delivery, not the delivery itself. This blog is part of the process of evolution in archival journal publishing that aims to take the next steps in exploiting the digital platform to impact the content that is delivered.

I will moderate this blog in the early days in order to monitor the flow, but I expect that it will truly evolve into an open forum for discussions of problems related to structural integrity. The initial aims of the blog are as follows:

1. Each article published in the journal will have its own unique, linked blog entry created at the time of publication.
1. Authors will have an opportunity to include additional information regarding the article in the blog – background information, algorithms, details of methods and materials, movies and animations, images and data for use by others, etc can be added to the blog.
2. Errata may be included in the blog; since it is linked to the journal article, it is easy to track such entries.
3. Readers may compliment or critique the article, pose questions to the authors and thereby engage the authors in a discussion about the article. These will be monitored by the Blog Moderator; the discussion must be constructive.
2. The blog will serve as a forum for discussion of emerging issues of interest to the fracture community. These might be prompted by musings from the moderator or from questions posted by bloggers; discussions of interesting articles, books, conferences not necessarily connected to the journal, but of interest to the fracture community are encouraged.
3. New sections/classifications of specific subtopics in fracture may be organized depending on the level of activity; for example, discussions of pedagogical aspects of the discipline may be organized as a sub-topic within the blog.
4. The blog will have a section devoted to announcements; postings on upcoming conferences, new books etc.

The evolution of this medium is really under the control of the community and I encourage you to explore this opportunity to participate in this interesting experiment. I am open to suggestions from bloggers on what else we may accomplish with the blog.

The blog is now open to the public; the journal’s homepage can be found on Springer.com, and the full-text online version can be found on SpringerLink.com.