My family and friends will say that I am brutally honest. I honestly love being an applied researcher. I had an interview one time in an academic department, where all of the interviewers wanted me to be a basic researcher. I finally stated that I enjoy being an applied researcher and I am happy with this choice. My career has been an extremely interesting one that I would never trade for a basic research career. I will also make the case that more research funding is available in applied research than basic research because applications drive new capabilities and markets.

In the spirit of applied work, Engineering and Laboratory Notes (E&L Notes) was launched in 1993 as a quarterly Optics and Photonics News supplement that was published until 2002 (I call this version 1.0). In 2015, Joseph N. Mait and OSA relaunched E&L Notes in Applied Optics just before I became Editor-in-Chief. Brian Monacelli became Features Editor and grew the interest in E&L Notes as well as stabilized submissions and published papers at reasonable numbers to make it a viable journal feature (I call this version 2.0). We are currently realigning E&L Notes with our next Features Editor, David Haefner, and a team of Reviewers to include Orges Furxhi, Erwan Baleine, Austin Richards, John Nunn, and Matthew Fisher.

E&L Notes version 3.0 will align to an applied goal of publishing useful engineering practices, laboratory procedures, analysis methods, optical designs, etc. The key word here is that these publications are useful. For research papers, significance and originality are required. E&L Notes are still expected to be significant, but the originality requirement is waived. Research papers will not be considered for E&L Notes and will be referred to the normal channels of Applied Optics. The E&L Notes team is chartered with determining whether papers are useful and repeatable. I encourage those of you who have potential E&L Notes contributions to please prepare a manuscript and submit it.

This really is a contribution to our applied optics community. In a recent OSA Publications Council meeting, we discussed our expectations for E&L Notes. The proposed changes were well received and the Council welcomed the opportunity to attract contributors and readers who are more likely to be practitioners and not researchers. In my own opinion, the metric of success will be the number of downloads and not the number of citations, although we could be pleasantly surprised with the number of citations for E&L Notes that are extremely useful. We will see.

I am about to begin my sixth and final year as Applied Optics Editor-in-Chief. I have really enjoyed working with OSA staff and our dedicated editorial board. I am grateful for the opportunity I have had to improve Applied Optics in many ways (to include Journal Impact Factor). In all honesty, I am also looking forward to completing the assignment. But I will forever be an author and Applied Optics will always be my journal. Honest.

Ron Driggers

Editor-in-Chief, Applied Optics