The expected approval for the construction of ITER will have great impact on the way magnetic confinement research will be pursued. Many national laboratories will have to, at least partially, refocus their programmes, as they have to procure various subsystems for ITER. This means a gradual move from physics to more technological R and D and construction of hardware. This will be reflected in the publication output of the fusion community. Nuclear Fusion will anticipate this change by publishing special issues related to the more technological IAEA Technical Meetings and to other workshops on plasma engineering issues such as heating systems, diagnostic systems, feedback control aspects and subsequent test results. The greater emphasis on technology will also be reflected in the increase of Nuclear Fusion articles related to the technology contributions to the IAEA Fusion Energy Conferences. However, our Board of Editors advises that the chosen technology subjects should be related to the more traditional, physics, subjects of Nuclear Fusion.This new line is reflected in the choice of special issues for the end of 2003/beginning of 2004:This issue: Aspects of steady state operation (3rd IAEA TM Arles/Greifswald, May 2002);Electron Cyclotron Waves in Fusion Plasmas (EC-12 and SMP-2002 together);Overview Papers from the FEC-2002.Later next year another three special issues of Nuclear Fusion are planned:The ITER Physics Data Base Revised (this is an initiative of the IPTA-group);IFSA-2003: results of ICF research presented in Monterey on 7-12 September 2003;Workshop on Stochasticity in Fusion Edge Plasmas (SEP), 6-8 October 2003, Jülich.This current issue of Nuclear Fusion contains a number of regular articles as well as a group of 11 articles related to Steady State Operation of Magnetic Fusion Devices from the 3rd IAEA Technical Meeting (Arles/Greifswald, 2-7 May 2002)These 11 articles are related only to a subset of all the presentations given. Most of the presentations were too specialized or otherwise not suitable to be reworked into an article of interest for the general readership of Nuclear Fusion. The selection of articles addresses the following issues:experimental results of the long pulse operation of Tore Supra and DIII-D;simulations of long pulse scenarios for Tore Supra operation;state-of-the-art feedback control of JET plasmas;technology aspects of long pulse NB-heating and cryogenics (W7-X);plans for steady state devices in South Korea (KSTAR) and China (HT-7U).