Issue 18

Frattura ed Integrità Strutturale, 18 (2011); Notiziario 85 The complete presentations can be downloaded from the website: - http://www.structuralintegrity.eu/tc24.html The ongoing projects on axles design and durability are: EURAXLES (EU project), WOLAXIM (EU project), MARAXIL (italian-german bilateral agreement), EISBFW3 (german funded cooperative project). The next TC24 meeting is expected to be hosted by PoliMi in May 2012, further details will appear before December 2011. ESIS website: http://www.structuralintegrity.eu FRACTURE BLOG: più di 1000 reads per ogni commento di Brocks Promoting and intensifying this aim is what we want to achieve through a new blog that ESIS will manage on Imechanica: http://www.imechanica.org/blog/23810 for discussing some of the papers which appear in Engineering Fracture Mechanics. Its editors, Profs. Karl-Heinz Schwalbe and Tony Ingraffea, fully support this initiative. ESIS hopes that this blog will achieve the following objectives:  To start a scientific discussion on relevant topics through comments by leading scientists (the chief ‘commenter’ will be Prof. Wolfgang Brocks);  To remind the authors of papers in EFM (and all the fracture community) that perhaps they have forgotten something important which was published in the past (perhaps in old books);  To promote a real cross-citation of the papers and a substantive discussion of ideas in a scenario where, in spite of the easy on-line access to most journals, there is a serious tendency to restrict the number of ‘external references’ and a snobbish tendency to promote ‘auto-citations’ (to the same group, the same journal, the same country);  To focus attention on new ideas that run the serious risk of not emerging from the noise of too much published “stuff”;  To induce bloggers to communicate their opinions on a paper, in particular their interpretation of the research results, thus adding new thoughts to that paper. In addition, to promote excellence in publication in a scenario where deficiencies of a paper may not have been detected by the reviewers, simply due to the pressure of time the reviewers have to do their work.