© 2004 by European Society of Cardiology
Copyright © 2004, European Society of Cardiology
The Editorial Team reflects on 2003: our first year "in office"
Institute of Physiology, Justus-Liebig University of Giessen, Aulweg 129, 35392 Giessen, Germany
* Corresponding author. Tel.: +49-641-994-7242; fax: +49-641-994-7209. CVR{at}physiologie.med.uni-giessen.de
Received 4 November 2003; At the end of last year, when a truck arrived from the previous Cardiovascular Research editorial office in Amsterdam with four filing cabinets full of manuscripts, we all swallowed hard with the thought of what lay ahead. We rolled up our sleeves, however, and got right to work. Looking back, the experience of those first 6 weeks was quite different from the routine of the Editorial Office today. In January, our fax machine was constantly running out of paper, and courier companies would have to come two or three times a day to deliver and pick up manuscripts. The induction of the electronic manuscript handling system in February radically changed all of that.
Submission is now carried out almost entirely online, and invitations to review are sent by email. Referees and editors enter their reports online, and decisions are communicated by email. Overall, this procedure has contributed to a streamlining of the entire submission/review/decision process such that a first decision is reached within an average of 22 days counting from the day of submission.
Increased speed has not been the only change that the electronic system has brought about: our submission rate has also increased this year to an average of about 120 per month, up from 95 per month last year. Consequently, since we have not increased our publication volume, we have had to reject a few more manuscripts than the previous editorial team. However, part of this increase in submissions has been due to manuscripts that are outside of the scope and aims of the Journal. The online submission process has also enabled scientists from far abroad to easily and rapidly submit their manuscripts without the time and expense of postal or courier delivery.
In addition to these positive changes in journal administration, the Impact Factor of Cardiovascular Research has also increased in the past year from 4.55 to 4.69. The Journal holds fifth place among 66 publications in the area of cardiac and cardiovascular systems. Furthermore, the number of requests to download full-text articles from the website has doubled to about 35,000 per month. The three Spotlight Issues published per year make an important contribution to the visibility of the Journal, and we are continuing this tradition in 2004 with themes dealing with the mechanisms of reperfusion injury, gap junctions in the cardiovascular system, and signaling networks in cardiac hypertrophy. A review series on functional genomics in heart failure is also planned.
There are two important new developments in the publication process that will take place in 2004. Starting this year we are introducing a rapid publication track (see announcement, this issue) for manuscripts of high priority that communicate major advances or provide novel insight—this can only increase the impact of the Journal. Independent of this, we will also start publishing regular manuscripts more rapidly online by posting the typeset article as soon as it is created, usually within 17 working days of acceptance. To sum up our offer to authors: we will strive to fulfill a "triple-three" promise of 3 reviewers, 3 weeks to a decision, and 3 weeks to online publication.
In closing, we would like to stress that the success of Cardiovascular Research is mostly due to its pool of active and engaged reviewers (see list posted in this issue) and members of the Board of Consulting Editors. They have readily adapted to the conversion to the electronic system and have helped to increase the rapidity of the reviewing process. We look forward to our second year of fruitful interaction with authors and reviewers alike.
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