How LNCS Helped to Shape the Field of Business Process Management Wil M.P. van der Aalst 1,2 1 Process and Data Science, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany 2 Fraunhofer FIT, Sankt Augustin, Germany wvdaalst@rwth-aachen.de www.vdaalst.com Abstract. Alfred Hofmann has been responsible for our Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series for over 30 years. During these years the field of computer science changed dramatically. First of all, computer science has become much more important. This is reflected by the number of LNCS volumes per year growing from a handful per year to over 600 volumes per year. Second, computer science broadened its scope and now also includes topics such as data science and business process management. Alfred Hofmann dedicated his career to LNCS and helped to create a publication channel for both established and upcoming fields. For example, the Business Process Management (BPM) conference series was published in LNCS right from the start in 2003. To celebrate Alfred’s contributions, I reflect on LNCS from a BPM perspective. Keywords: Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS), Business Pro- cess Management (BPM) conference series 1 Introduction I’m happy to contribute to this “commemorative publication”, celebrating Alfred Hofmann’s contributions to the Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series over the last 30 years. LNCS was established in 1973. In the first years there were only a dozen LNCS volumes per year. When Alfred took over, less than 100 were published per year and there were discussions to stop the LNCS series. Thanks to his efforts, LNCS expanded impressively. Alfred traveled around the world for almost 30 years to promote the LNCS series. In 2016, the milestone of 10.000 volumes was reached. Currently, there are over 12.000 LNCS volumes with around 600 being added each year. These include transactions subseries such as “Petri Nets and Other Models of Concurrency” (ToPNoC) and topical subseries such as “Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence” (LNAI) and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics (LNBI). There are also “sister series” such as “Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing” (LNBIP), where I’m one of the editors. I have organized many conferences and workshops published by Springer in LNCS (and also LNBIP). This always required the approval of Alfred. He would send an e-mail with the topic “Conference XYZ – LNCS: Okay!”. Compared to