This January 2013 issue of the Journal represents a significant transition from the publishing perspective. As our readers may recall, June of 2012 was an important landmark. Starting with that issue, the page budget of the Journal was dramatically increased to approximately 320 per issue in order to expedite the publication of an ever-increasing volume of papers accepted and online published but awaiting publication in print, and this policy had been maintained through the December 2012 issue. Implementation of this policy has been challenging for the publishers and our editorial offices. However, with the generous support from Informa Healthcare, and specifically from Ms. Didi Peng, our senior managing editor and her colleagues, and through hard work and dedication of the editorial and production staff, it is expected that the backlog will be cleared by the end of the year.
The Journal’s editorial board, Ms. Peng, Professor Di Renzo and I had been deeply concerned with the increasing volume of the backlog despite raising a substantially higher threshold for acceptance and simultaneously increasing the pages of the journal per issue. We are naturally very pleased with our progress in resolving this challenge. Between June and December 2012 the Journal published in print 469 manuscripts. The total number of papers for the volume 25, issues 1 to 12, constituting the whole year of 2012 was 583, a truly astounding number. We envision that the entire current backlog will be completely published by April 2013.
We fully appreciate the need for timely publication for original scientific work and are very grateful to our authors for their patience and understanding. Going forward, the Journal will have two online issues and a combined single print issue in one month alternating with a single online and print issue the next month, resulting in an increased frequency of 18 issues per year. This process will start from January of 2013. This creative arrangement will enable us to serve appropriately our distinguished contributors and to meet with the enormous popularity of the Journal with our readers.