Copyright © 2007, European Society of Cardiology
The present editorial team: Ushering CVR into its fifth decade
Cardiovascular Research Editorial Office, Aulweg 129, D-35392 Giessen, Germany
* Corresponding author. Tel.: +49 641 99 47 242; fax: +49 641 99 47 209. CVR{at}physiologie.med.uni-giessen.de
Cardiovascular Research is celebrating its fortieth year of existence this year. Therefore, the Editorial Team would like to take this opportunity to reflect on the Journal's past, present, and future. To look into the past we've invited an author (John Ross Jr.) of the very first CVR paper ever published to give his impressions of basic cardiology at the time of the Journal's inception in 1967. We've also invited editorials from several former editors-in-chief (Peter Sleight, David Hearse, and Michiel Janse) in which they reminisce about their experiences at the helm of the Journal. To look at the present, we have just learned as this editorial goes to press that our impact factor has risen once again, to its highest value ever: 5.826 for the year 2006 (see Fig. 1). This is a very nice "birthday present" to our journal and makes us confident for the years to come.
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To elaborate on the Journal's future, we'd like to discuss in the following paragraphs perspectives for Cardiovascular Research as it enters its fifth decade. In the years that the present editorial team has been in place, the look and feel of journal publishing has been changing. We've seen the Journal go through a transition that could be described as progressing from a "metal filing cabinet" period to a "mouse click" era, and use of the printed issue has declined while the importance of our internet platform has risen. This is a trend for most journals in the biomedical sphere and is connected to another major change that scientific journals have experienced during recent years: the continuous selective pressure driven by bibliometric analysis and the impact factor. This has made journal editing much more competitive and exciting, but has made editors' lives a little bit more complicated. In the future, journals will have to keep abreast of their online usage statistics, and it may be that the impact factor as a sole bibliometric measure of a journal's value will be replaced or at least supplemented in the coming years by other statistics such as those based on requests for full-text downloads and visits to the journal homepage.
The big challenge for the future will be to hold on to and increase a solid readership that is using the Journal in new ways: not by opening the latest printed issue that just came with the post, catching a whiff of its still-fresh ink while scanning the table of contents, but rather by clicking on a link to articles-in-press arriving in an e-mail or turning up in a search of Pub Med and reading about the latest findings within a particular field of interest, downloading graphs or data into a presentation, using citation analysis tools to see what other papers have cited this one (even using a DOI number to cite it before it appears in print), finding out from the journal homepage which articles are the most highly cited or downloaded, etc. The trend toward open access publishing will also play a role. It may not be long before our readers hardly remember the printed issues but still use "Cardiovascular Research" publications as a prime source for scientific information and publishing. This will be because they understand the Journal's name as a brand stamped on excellent papers selected by CVR's expert reviewers and editors. They will also appreciate, as they do today, the efforts that CVR puts into its Spotlight and Review Focus collections or series of reviews on hot topics in cardiovascular research.
The term of the present editorial team has also seen changes in the running of journals and handling of manuscripts. When we took over from the Amsterdam team at the end of 2002, we were receiving 4 copies of 3–5 manuscripts by post or courier daily. Reviewers were invited by fax and received their papers to review by courier, and decisions were sent by post or fax. During our first months we experienced the adventure of changing it all over to an online manuscript handling system. This brought with it greatly reduced paperwork – inviting reviewers and forwarding manuscripts to them, sending reminders to reviewers and decision letters to authors, etc. – all could now be taken care of online or by e-mail. In the meantime, such fully electronic systems have become the status quo. However, this is not to say that they don't have their own set of quirks and errors, a few of which we want to share with you in the following excerpts1:
Decision letters
Our decision letters sometimes look a little strange when an author, while registering himself in the system, types the title of his manuscript into the box by his name marked "Title" instead of entering "Dr." or "Professor". An example:
Dear Pigs as Models in Cardiac Research,Your manuscript has been evaluated by expert reviewers and the Editorial Team. We regret to inform you that...
In addition, as a result of most communication being carried out by electronic mail, we have been privy to messages that we wouldn't normally see. This happens when an author who has just received a decision letter by email pushes the "Reply" instead of the "Forward" button in the mail program, and the message gets sent mistakenly to the Editorial Office:
Dear Jim!These ignorants didn't take it either. At least the review was fast. If you agree I'll send the article relatively unchanged to ....
Dear Heather,This has not been a good day. Our paper has been rejected, I think mainly by reviewer #2 who seems to be a expert in our field, unfortunately. Go ahead and have a stiff drink with Jennifer and Simon.
Letters from reviewers
Independent of how efficient the reviewing process has become, there are many excuses reviewers have for either not accepting to review or being late with their comments. In response to an invitation to review, a very honest person wrote:
This is an excellent paper, I know for sure. However, I have to refuse to review it... I am one of the authors!
Reviewers usually want to be on time with their reviews but sometimes are physically prevented from submitting. In this case it was the reviewer's caring wife who relayed a message to the Editorial Office:
Dear Editors,I'm sorry but my husband has just fallen from a ladder and will not be able to send his review in time. Can he have an additional day? He may have recovered by then.
Another took a more sporty approach:
I was hit by a baseball and had to have emergency surgery. I'm afraid I won't be able to review this one.
Cardiovascular Research started out in 1967 as a journal of the British Medical Association. Today it is a truly international journal. This is due in part to its present ownership by the European Society of Cardiology, but also to its ever expanding author and reviewer "clientele"; the former now encompasses 68 different countries of origin and the latter 48 countries. About half of all papers submitted to CVR come from Europe, and a quarter are submitted from the U.SA. or Canada. Submissions from Asia are growing at a fast pace, in accordance with the huge investments in science and technology in this part of the world. Overall, the countries most active in submitting papers coincide roughly with those most involved in reviewing them. We are convinced that this is required for fairness in the reviewing practice of an international journal. We try to make sure that the reviewers selected for a paper are unlikely to have a national or regional bias.
In summary, the present editorial team has seen Cardiovascular Research go through a transition period that will continue to bring with it new ways of publishing and using the Journal. Many of the policies and ideas of the former editorial teams have been carried forth and new ones have been installed. Often, CVR has been ahead of the changes in the publishing field. We will do our best to push the Journal into a successful next decade.
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1 Names have been changed.
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