This is our final editorial as editors of DEI. We have both enjoyed our role as editors but have now decided that the time has come to step aside. We are delighted that two excellent replacements have been appointed – Rachel O’Neill from the University of Edinburgh, UK and Jill Duncan from Newcastle University in Australia. Rachel and Jill have been working alongside us for the past few months and now they will take things forward. Already they have shown enthusiasm and have ideas for future special issues.
DEI is a niche journal that has a specialist readership. Addressing topics related to deafness and education means that its content draws from several distinct disciplines, always endeavouring to bear in mind that many of its readers are practitioners with an interest in the research that underpins their practice. Copy flow can be an on-going challenge for editors, too much and authors have to wait for too long for their work to be published whilst too little can delay publication of an issue. We have experienced both these challenges. The previous, small format meant it was easy to create a backlog of papers and when this happened the previous publisher took the decision to increase the format size, which meant that double the number of papers could be included in each issue. The backlog was quickly used but there was not a sufficient increase in the number of quality papers submitted to sustain the copy flow demanded so the current publisher has decided to revert to the previous format.
Our time as editors has spanned the final years of our working lives for both of us. Since we have shared similar research interests and have collaborated on projects related to these interests, we have decided to include a final paper, which is a review and synthesis of studies in the early language and literacy development of deaf children and the paper is included in this issue.
We wish DEI a long and successful future under the new editors.