Special Issue - Papers from JAST Tribology Conference, Nagoya, September 2008

The Japanese Society of Tribologists organizes domestic Tribology Conferences named “JAST Tribology Conference” in spring and autumn every year. The 2009 Autumn Conference was held at Nagoya as “JAST Tribology Conference, Nagoya, September 2008.” A total of 266 presentations were made with seven parallel sessions.At every Tribology Conference, JAST publishes a bound volume of proceedings, which includes extended abstracts of all the papers presented. However, the pages are limited to two pages for each paper and most of them are written in Japanese. In order to distribute their high-quality research works worldwide, JAST invited the authors to write their works in English to submit to Tribology Online.The papers thus submitted to the Tribology Online have subsequently undergone the normal peer review process by multiple reviewers. The International session was also held at this conference, and the selected papers submitted and reviewed were already published in Vol. 3, No. 7, 2008. This special issue is planed for the ordinary technical sessions.On behalf of the Editorial Committee, I, Editor-in-Chief, acknowledge the authors' efforts to submit their papers to this International Journal. In addition, I would like to express my sincere thanks to the Associate Editors, the Reviewers, and the Publication Coordinators for their effort to complete the peer-review processes and the publication work under the tight schedule.Editor-in-ChiefMasabumi Masuk