Dear Colleagues
Welcome to the first edition of Ocular Immunology & Inflammation for 2016. As usual for this first edition of the year, I would like both to reflect on what we have achieved over the last 12 months and point to some highlights for the coming year.
Since we started in 2009 to select a “Disease of the Year”, we have covered various important disorders, with last year focusing on “HLA-B27-associated Ocular Inflammation”. My thanks go to the members of the OII Editorial Board who worked on this project, including Aniki Rothova, James Rosenbaum, Emmett Cunningham, Phil Murray, and Denis Wakefield. The concept of inviting various experts to summarize their experience in one review has proven to be quite valuable, as it allows several experts to compare and consolidate their individual experiences.
For 2016, we want to switch from “Disease of the Year” to an important topic that touches on many diseases: “Multimodal Imaging in Uveitis”. Techniques to be covered will include high resolution optical coherence tomography (OCT), including both en face reconstruction and OCT-angiography, along with both traditional and widefield color fundus photography, fluorescein angiography, indocyanine green angio-graphy, and fundus autofluorescence imaging. Invited articles will address the role of these various imaging modalities in diagnosis and management of uveitis. The Editorial Working Group for this topic will include Padmamalini Mahendradas, Anita Agarwal, Soon Phaik Chee, Marc de Smet, Amod Gupta, Vishali Gupta, Quan D. Nguyen, André Romano, Miriam van Velthoven, and Daniel Vasconcellos-Santos.
A special note of appreciation goes to Emmett Cunningham. As you no doubt noticed, each of last year’s issues contained a focused Editorial highlighting and discussing a thematic cluster of articles published in that issue. Most of these Editorials were done in collaboration with one or more international experts, including many from OII’s Editorial Board. For that, I would like to thank both Emmett and our many collaborators.
Last, I would like to share with you the fact that OII’s impact factor has increased significantly over the last year, from 1.440 to 1.972. This is a testament to the tremendous efforts of both our contributors and reviewers. In recognition of this success, the publishers of OII have decided to increase the total number of pages per issue by 50 percent. I would encourage you, therefore, to submit your best work to OII so that we can continue to provide our readers with the highest quality articles and reviews from the field of ocular immunology and inflammation.
Thank you for your continuing support and Happy New Year!