The refereeing system works well, and without major difficulties, although the rejection rate of IBVS is high. We have good relation with the vast majority of the authors, both with professionals and amateurs. They, in most cases accept the referees' opinions, and seldom ask for a second referee. We help those authors whose technical background is not suitable to prepare manuscripts in the given format, but whose science is good. We also have good contact with some amateur groups to whom we give editorial advice.
At the previous GA in Kyoto we decided to set up a template file for papers that report observations or announce discoveries of variable stars with only a few remarks. This gives basic information about the variables and availability of the data. The template form has proved to be very successful - many good observations are published this way and premature or unnecessarily lengthy discussions are avoided.
During the last triennium the electronic version of IBVS became very important. Papers appear on the IBVS webpage first, shortly after their acceptance. The number of registered users at the time of the previous GA was 336. That grew to 522 by August, 2000. Registered electronic users of IBVS at present are in 56 countries.
The usage of the IBVS website (www.konkoly.hu/IBVS/IBVS.html) started to grow in the middle of 1997 when IBVS joined the ADS services. The hits to our website now are about 50000/month, but this is not a real estimate of usage, since most of these hits are made by the ``robots'' searching through the Web. A more realistic figure is the monthly 3000-4000 downloads.
The scanned pages of IBVS Nos. 1-4000 are now available on a single CD-ROM. The GNU zipped postscript files are accessible from a HTML-format Table of Contents file.
From IBVS No. 5000 the Scientific Editor Laszlo Szabados retires from the editorship. He will be replaced by Dr. Johanna Jurcsik, Konkoly Observatory. Also, the Editorial Board is changed after the GA, as it is every three years. Herewith we would like to express our thanks to Laszlo Szabados for persistent, excellent work for the IBVS. The Editors in Budapest appreciate very much the service of the outgoing members of the Editorial Board: Dr. P. Harmanec (Chair), Kam-Ching Leung and Edwin Budding.
Argentina 9 Malta 1 Australia 20 Mexico 3 Austria 3 Moldova 1 Bangladesh 1 New Caledonia 1 Belgium 7 New Zealand 3 Brazil 8 Norway 1 Bulgaria 2 Pakistan 1 Canada 32 Peru 2 Chile 6 Poland 11 China 2 Portugal 1 Czech Republic 7 Republic of Korea 1 Denmark 7 Romania 2 Dominican Republic 1 Russia 5 Egypt 2 Slovakia 2 Estonia 3 Slovenia 2 Finland 1 South Africa 5 France 11 South Korea 9 Germany 16 Spain 31 Greece 4 State of Bahrain 1 Hungary 10 Sweden 7 India 9 Switzerland 2 Indonesia 1 The Netherlands 2 Iran 5 Turkey 10 Israel 3 UK 35 Italy 31 Ukraine 3 Japan 12 Uruguay 1 Korea 1 USA 197 Latvia 1 Venezuela 2