Another transition

The Journal of Dermatological Treatment celebrates 20 years of publication, filling a critical need for a journal that would focus on treatment issues in Dermatology. The founding editors, Professor Ronald Marks and Dr Andrew Y. Finlay, built the journal on a solid foundation. Nearly 50 papers were published in the first year, and that number grew slowly and steadily until 2010, when the number of publications doubled. The growth has been more remarkable the last two years with about 400 and 500 papers published, respectively.

The popularity of our journal has been a blessing, but it has had its downside, too. Despite increasing the number of publications, there was a growing backlog of excellent accepted articles awaiting publication. Our policy of online publication helps mitigate to some extent the effects of the backlog, making the information on dermatologic treatment publicly available long before articles appeared in our print journals. Nevertheless, the need to publish information on the many new treatment options for psoriasis, atopic dermatitis, vitiligo, alopecia, and other dermatologic diseases along with advances in surgical and cosmetic dermatology has continued to push against the limits of our publishing model.

Fortunately, the journal’s publisher, Taylor & Francis (part of Informa), has come to the rescue! This year, our journal will publish more articles in each issue than ever before. We anticipate our backlog will be fully cleared by the end of 2022. And we will move to a new open access publishing model that will assure that all the critical information we publish on dermatologic treatment is rapidly and widely accessible.

We thank our authors, our publishers, our readers, and especially our saintly reviewers who volunteer and do the critical behind the scenes work essential to continue maintain the high quality of dermatologic treatment science published here.