January 26, 2015 (E31).  First major part of this Issue brings selected plenary and invited slide presentations given at the International Symposium on Superconductivity (ISS 2014) held in Funabori, Tokyo, Japan, on November 25 to 27, 2014.  Some of these presentations were annotated by authors to enhance understandability.  Those not annotated either didn’t require it or were deemed by us sufficiently important to deserve publication, even when the speaker wasn’t in position to annotate.  We also publish one ASC 2014 invited presentation by V. Vysotsky submitted to us after we published Issue No. 30 devoted to ASC 2014 invited preprints and presentations.  It is not annotated, because the corresponding Vysotsky’s paper appeared already in IEEE Xplore “Early Access” to IEEE Trans. Appl. Supercond. (TASC) accepted papers.

 

In the second major part of this Issue, we pre-publish 20 contributed preprints which were winners and runners up in the SNF Contest for best ASC 2014 contributions.  These were selected by our panel of reviewers from about 50 manuscripts submitted to SNF.  Presumably, only those authors participated who were convinced of high quality of their contribution.

 

Finally, we publish five highlights (précis) on recent work published in peer-reviewed journals, which we like to bring to our readers’ attention.