Thank you very much, ladies & gentlemen, first of all, on behalf of all members of Korean CSE, I greet you all and welcome to the inaugural assembly meeting of Council of Asian Science Editors (CASE).

As you heard this morning, KCSE was established 3 years ago with the aim of fostering Korean Science journals through training and education, and therefore, main target of our activity was local science journals. However, KCSE was always keen to keep our ties with Asian editors and organizations. We believe that formal and informal collaboration among Asian science editors would be important for the improvement of Asian scientific research publication and could provide a synergistic effect.

As you all agree, Asian countries are putting more and more effort on science research, producing more papers than other region of the world.

Unfortunately, however, many of these works, especially high-quality works end up in non-Asian journals. At the same time the proportion of publications controlled by international publishing companies is becoming larger. I think this is about time for Asian science editors sit together and come up with some measures to turn around current trend.

As described in Background and purpose of the Council of Asian Science Editors (CASE) which, I am sure, you have read already, 16 Asian science editors get together October, 2013 and agreed on a number of matters, and one of them was the establishment of the Council of Asian Science Editors. After around one year preparation, we are very happy to propose official inauguration of CASE today. As a member of preparation committee for CASE, I am very proud to report upto now we have a total of 137 members from 21 different countries agreed to join CASE as you see in the list of membership of CASE.

I firmly believe that CASE will become a pivotal international organization for the development of Asian Science Journals.

Once again thank you very much for your support to the establishment of CASE.