I will begin this editorial by answering the question “What are feature issues and institutional issues?” It is simple. They provide an opportunity to highlight research in specific areas or from specific organizations. The areas can be hot topics, e.g., automotive lidar or AI/ML as applied to optics, or can focus on a collection of papers from an organization. The organization can be a university, industry, or government lab.

Applied Optics feature issues have been around a long time to serve the function of collating work in a particular field of study for the readers. Historically, the feature issues arise from conferences or workshops that warrant an opportunity to publish outstanding research findings that go beyond the abstract-type papers used to evaluate conference submissions.

Institutional issues have a different history. In 2014, Joe Mait, then Editor-in-Chief for Applied Optics, initiated institutional issues. There are a few university programs scattered around the United States that have degree programs in optics. However, there are many more universities in the United States and worldwide that have strong optics programs embedded in other schools and colleges. Likewise, there are government research labs and industrial research labs that have good optics-related research. Some of these research groups or organizations are known in the community, while others are hidden secrets. Institutional issues provide an opportunity to highlight groups located at universities, research labs (government and non-government), and industries.

I have been a guest editor for both feature and institutional issues. The process for candidacy for a feature or institutional issue is straightforward. For feature issues, the process is to (1) determine if there is a conference or a specific topic to focus on, (2) identify the proposed guest editors, and (3) complete the feature issue application form. If the feature evolves from a conference, the guest editors are usually comprised of the topical meeting organizers. For feature issues not associated with a conference, the guest editors should include experts in the field with representation from our global community. It is important to reach out to your colleagues around the world to ensure there is balanced coverage of the topic and broad exposure for the feature issue.

Institutional issues are a little more challenging to assemble since optics research crosses multiple departments in most universities and may take place within multiple divisions of a company or government lab. I must admit, when we got approved for an institutional issue for Georgia Tech, it was a juggling act to reach across multiple schools and research groups to solicit papers for the issue. Furthermore, as we all know, research is not ready for publication at the turn of a switch, so allowing time to socialize the idea for paper submission deadlines is probably the most difficult aspect of soliciting papers from an organization. The same is true in government labs and industry. There is an added complication of getting approvals from the organizations to publish work that is sensitive. The process for proposing institutional issues is the same as feature issues except to replace the conference or focus topic with the organization featured. We seek to vary the regions that are represented through institutional issues by rotating among North America, Europe, Asia and other regions when possible.

I hope I have answered the “what and why” about our feature and institutional issues in Applied Optics. I encourage you to browse our full listing of active and completed feature and institutional issues (going back to 1977) on our website.

Please reach out to aomss@optica.org if you have questions or are interested in putting one of these issues together. I look forward to working with you.