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EDITORIAL
EDITORIALS
Institute of Physiology, Humboldt University, Charité, Berlin, Germany
WITH BARELY FOUR MONTHS remaining in the term for this editorial team, we would like to take one last look back at the journal’s progress these past years. When the team of expert associate editors and I took the reins of this journal back in June 2001, we had the impression that the AJP-Regulatory, Integrative and Comparative Physiology was a prestigious leading journal that still offered potential for growth and refinement. It was our vision to focus in on topics and issues that would present our readers with the newest insights and exciting hypotheses. Our goal of providing the best services possible for our contributors and readers coincided with the AJP’s streamlining and digitalizing the submission and review process. We were confident our operations and services would be a positive factor in the review process and encourage contributors to submit their best work to our journal. We are optimistic that we have come a substantial way toward achieving that goal, and we look forward to the new editor-in-chief’s term. We are very confident that the new team will succeed in further promoting the journal.
The journal’s ability to entice the best manuscripts possible is its most important asset, and a fairly good indicator of its performance. Although there will be fluctuations from month to month, I was extremely pleased when I realized that we had had as many submissions by the end of September 2006 as we had for a total in all of 2001. The fact that our impact factor has risen at a similar rate in the same amount of time indicates that not only quantity but also quality has improved. We never like to put too much emphasis on the impact factor, but it is never a bad sign when the statistic increases from barely above two in 2001 to touching four. Our manuscript acceptance ratio is holding strong at 49%, which when only accounting for original articles, is adjusted to 43%.
There is a line in business that says "marketing brings them in, but operations bring them back." It is much the same with a peer-reviewed journal. A journal can have a fine scientific reputation, but if the contributors feel poorly treated, they will stop working with the journal, regardless. We have made a great effort to provide contributors with timely, balanced reviews, and the publications office makes super-human efforts to get accepted articles spick and span for publication. We have consistently kept our wait time to first decision at or below 28 days, and once a manuscript is accepted, it takes less than a week to be published online in our Articles in PresS section. Not only that, but by running special issues, and providing various types of manuscript selections, we try to provide authors with a number of options which will best highlight their works.
Our special Call for Papers series has been a great success for several years now. Seldom does an issue go by that doesn’t have at least a few representatives from our special calls. And the calls have given us the added bonus of working with very talented and switched-on guest editors. I am grateful to all of them for their help and support these past years. This February issue will see the fruits of two calls: Drs. Christine Baylis and Kate Denton’s very popular "Sex Differences in Renal and Cardiovascular Function: Physiology and Pathophysiology." The recent January issue was top-heavy with cutting edge work resulting from Dr. Andrej Romanovsky’s thermoregulation call. Seldom have we had such a response as we received from that call dealing with the Physiology and Pharmacology of Temperature Regulation. Scientists from all over the world submitted over 100 manuscripts for that call. All of our guest editors put in an extraordinary amount of extra effort to be a part of these projects, and we are all very pleased with the resulting issues. The past year was especially successful with regard to these calls, and 2007 has already started off with a fantastic collection, too.
Having stressed how important our editors, guest and permanent, are to the success of the journal, it is also important to mention that in the past 6 years, well over 8,000 referees have contributed their time and expertise to the review of our manuscripts. Their hard work has been instrumental in our endeavors to keep the quality of the journal high.
It has been a great pleasure for me to be the editor in chief for this renowned journal. I have had the opportunity to work with some very gifted people, all of whom have been a great help to me over the years. I would like to take this opportunity to thank all the contributors, referees, editors, and editorial staff who work to make this a truly leading journal in its field.
FOOTNOTES
Address for reprint requests and other correspondence: P. B. Persson, Institute of Physiology, Humboldt Univ., Charité, Tucholskystr. 2, 10117 Berlin, Germany (e-mail: pontus.persson{at}charite.de)
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