A Year of Change at JRM

It's hard to believe that it has been a year since I took over as Editor in Chief from Dr. Strauch. It's been an eventful year and not without its problems. However I'm pleased to report that submissions to the Journal are up and the quality of the papers I'm seeing is excellent. Thanks to all of you who have contributed to this success.

You will notice some changes to this Journal. The cover has been redesigned. This was done to highlight the changes that have happened and hopefully will continue to happen. You will also notice changes in the editorial board. I have reduced the size of the board and am also introducing a rotating board membership so that people will rotate off after 3 years. This will give an opportunity for more people to be involved while retaining a cadre of experienced board members. I hope that the editorial board will, in the future, be more active and more involved in the running of the journal. I would like to thank all the members of the old board for their invaluable service to the Journal over many years. Hopefully I can continue to count on your sage advice as reviewers! I have retained many of the old board members and each of you will rotate off the board over the next 3-year period. In that way I hope to have a constantly changing editorial board to keep the Journal at the leading edge. I have re-vamped the Associate Editor role and added a European and Asian Associate Editor. All of these changes are made to try and further improve our Journal and attract the best quality papers.

The past year, as I mentioned, presented some challenges. We moved to an online submission and review platform. This has worked very well though we have had some teething problems. You will notice that the past year's issues fell well behind in their dates of publication. This was because of a problem in electronically transferring files between Manuscript Central and Thieme, a problem that went unidentified for several months because we were receiving messages that the files were successfully sent. However we did not receive messages that the files were successfully received! This problem has now been solved and we have enough manuscripts in house to cover the next several issues. We will continue to strive to shorten the time to publication. All papers, once accepted and transferred to Thieme, will be electronically published. This will appear in PubMed citation as “e-pub ahead of print.” In this way we can get your work out there more quickly.

It has been a very exciting year for me. I thank you all for your patience and understanding and I look forward to working with you all in the future.