Abstract
The Journal of Cardiovascular Pharmacology and Therapeutics (JCPT) was founded in 1996 by the late Dr Bramah N. Singh at the Westside VA Hospital in Los Angeles and UCLA. Previously, there had only been a few journals dedicated to cardiovascular pharmacology and Dr Singh did a terrific job launching this new effort. I was initially an associate editor with the journal and in 2009 became the editor-in-chief. It has been quite an education, and I have learned an incredible amount from our editorial board, assistant editors, reviewers, and the hundreds of contributors to the journal. After 10 years as editor-in-chief, I will be stepping down and turning the journal over to the third editor-in-chief. In the 10 years that I have had the privilege to serve as editor we have made progress: expanded the editorial board, increased the impact factor of the journal from the ones to around 3 where it has hovered the last few years, increased the number of issues from 4 to 6 per year, increased the number of subscriptions, increased the number of downloaded articles, and published several focused issues including ones on cardioprotection, stem cells, and remote ischemic conditioning. We have restructured the content of the journal to appeal more to clinicians and translational scientists. We instituted cardiovascular pharmacology core reviews to update the reader on major therapeutic topics, included important review articles in most issues, and continued to publish both original clinical and experimental studies. We did limit or eliminate some types of articles, in order to stress a more clinically oriented group of papers: so in vitro cell culture or isolated vascular ring studies were referred to other journals, as were herbal medicine type papers. We saw an increase in submissions from less than 100 per year to about 300 or more per year. We were able to reduce the time from submission to initial first decision to about a month or less, an accomplishment that we are very proud of and for which we thank our dedicated reviewers. The rate of acceptance fell to about 20%, which is probably a good thing. Over the course of the 10 years, we saw major advances in cardiovascular pharmacology including newer approaches to reducing LDL cholesterol (PCSK9 inhibitors), further advances in the understanding and outcomes with statin therapy, the advent of new oral anticoagulants, powerful new antiplatelet agents, a better understanding of the role of inflammation in cardiovascular disease, new antianginal and antiarrhythmic agents, new drugs to treat heart failure, and a deeper understanding of the endogenous protective effects of conditioning. We covered most of these topics with both original and review articles.
Working on the journal has been a team approach and could not have been done without the input of hundreds of individuals. I would like to thank the support of the folks at SAGE Publishing, an absolutely first rate academic publishing company. I would like to especially thank the journal’s managers, Andrew Thompson and Courtney Pugh, my immediate supervisors at SAGE, as well as the several managing editors including Erin Nelson, Amanda Bockman, Jaymee Gray, and most recently Katie Willis, who have all done such a fine job interacting with authors and reviewers to keep things moving. I would like to thank Sharon Hale who has served as assistant editor since March of 2015 and who has been so very helpful finding reviewers, which has become increasingly challenging as the journal has grown and as we competed with more and more new cardiovascular journals. Sharon has also invited experts to provide invited review articles and has helped to fill in when I was away. I would also like to thank my administrative assistants from the Heart Institute of Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles (where our editorial offices were located from 1999 to 2014), Susan Yerington, and the late Cathy Davisson for their hard work and dedication to the journal. I would also like to thank the administration of the Huntington Medical Research Institutes for letting us move the editorial offices in 2015, from Los Angeles to Pasadena. I would like to thank the fine production crew at SAGE (especially Sambit Rath, Pinki Boura, Abishae Singh, and others) for their help with the Table of Contents and the proofing process. I thank our hundreds of reviewers who have dedicated time to the peer review process, a labor-intensive endeavor but still so important to the medical publishing process. And of course, I thank all of our contributors and readers who have helped to make this one of the most read cardiovascular pharmacology journals. It has been a privilege and honor to have served as editor-in-chief of JCPT over the last 10 years and I am sure that the incoming editor (see below) and their team will take the journal to even greater heights. I sincerely hope that you the readers have found the journal to be useful and educational. Thank you for your support of the journal and I look forward to continuing to read it along with you in the future.
Now, I am happy to learn that SAGE Publishers has selected Dr Karin Przyklenk, PhD, to be the next editor of JCPT. Dr Przyklenk is a well-known and highly respected translational scientist with expertise in cardiovascular pharmacology, physiology, and pathology. Dr Przyklenk is currently the director of the Cardiovascular Research Institute and Professor of Physiology and Emergency Medicine at Wayne State University of Medicine in Detroit, Michigan. She has made major discoveries in the field of protection of the heart in the setting of acute coronary syndromes, signaling pathways that improve tolerance to myocardial ischemia/reperfusion, and developed the important concept of remote ischemic preconditioning. She has collaborated with both basic scientists and clinicians and has a superb knowledge of cardiovascular medicine. Dr Przyklenk has been a valued member of the editorial board of JCPT, has provided insightful reviews of submitted manuscripts, and has contributed excellent articles to the journal. In addition, she served as guest editor on a well-received 2-issue focused project on remote ischemic conditioning. She has published over 175 peer-reviewed papers and is a superb writer and speaker, who is an expert at explaining complex mechanisms in a clear and engaging fashion. I am delighted that Dr Przyklenk will serve as the next editor of JCPT and I know that she will do an excellent job and further elevate the status of the journal.
Sincerely yours,