ScientificJournals.com - LCA Documents Preface to the Series

Publication of LCA results, methodological as well as applied studies has for a long time been a domain of grey literature: a few well printed reports by SETAC, BUWAL, SPOLD, EPA, The Nordic Council and a few other organisations and many grey, dark-grey reports and some papers scattered in the journals. As a first step to improve this situation, ecomed launched the International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment in December 1995. This Journal has been immediately accepted by the "LCA community" and turned out to be successful in every aspect: peer-reviewed papers on all LCA-subjects, a truly international board of editors and an increasing number of subscribers clearly show that such a publication was timely and needed. However, original study reports in LCA are necessarely lengthy due to the inventory tables, appendices and explanations needed for a full understanding of the systems investigated and the results obtained. This clearly surpasses the space available in a journal of about 60 pages per issue.

Therefore, the idea of a series of books supplementing the journal was in the air quite from the beginning. It was the cooperation of Eco-Informa Press with ecomed publishers and the editor of the journal which brought the idea into life. As in the case of the journal, the quick response by the potential authors and subscribers showed that again a real need has been identified. Only two months after the first announcement we already have enough manuscripts for the first year of the new series.

Most LCA-studies have been peer-reviewed in some way, either via a formal expert review according to ISO 14040 or to the internal reviewing process in the case of a Thesis or a cooperative document produced by working groups, as in the case of this Volume 1. Reviewing and editing by the board members and editors will therefore be kept at a minimum. With regard to language it is, of course, a fact that papers written in English have the broadest audience today. On the other hand, there are many interesting studies not published in this language. We therefore decided, as a compromise, also to accept manuscripts written in French and German. If translations exist, we prefer to publish the English version. Studies using non-metric units should be "translated" into SI. As in the case of the journal, we accept some non-SI units, e.g. kWh, which are accepted by ISO 1000 as additional units for special fields.

To provide the essential features of the study, a formalized summary in English is requested. The format of this summary, a detailed questionnaire, has been developed by IÖW, Heidelberg, and will (in its German version) be a DIN standard in the near future. This summary is explicitly developed for LCA studies of product systems. It will not be required for Theses, comprehensive methodological studies or proceedings of workshops.

We are happy and proud that the first volume of the series contains the final reports by the working groups and the summary report of LCANET. This work has been sponsored by the EU, directorate general XII in order to evaluate the present state of LCA and also to identify research gaps. The joint meeting of the working groups in Nordwijkerhout, November 1996 and the final meeting in Leiden, April 1997, brought together most of the leading European scientists and practitioners in the field of LCA. It is to be hoped that the spirit of these meetings will last and be transmitted - if this is possible on paper - to those who were unable to attend.

Last, but not least, we would like to thank those who encouraged us to start this initiative, above all to Mrs. Almut Heinrich, ecomed publishers, who once more inspired and gently urged us toward a new editorial venture. We also thank the members of the editorial board and the contributors of the first volumes.