Abstract
Scientific publishing is the basis for the exchange of knowledge between scientists and clinicians who are involved in improving patient care. Journals have the responsibility to select the best science and to avoid biases derived from personal views, unspectacular (or negative) findings and pressures from experts or economic interests, among others. The role of peer-reviewed journals is crucial in selecting and disseminating the most interesting information among healthcare professionals.
In this context, Therapeutic Advances in Respiratory Disease has successfully completed its first 5 years of history. The hard and intelligent work of Professor Mario Cazzola has led Therapeutic Advances in Respiratory Disease from a concept to a reality [Cazzola, 2007]. Thanks to his commitment, and particularly to his respected stature as professor, clinician, researcher and ‘respiratory pharmacologist’, as he likes to define himself, he was able to create an Editorial Board with some of the leading specialists in the field from around the world. I was lucky enough to be part of this Board from the beginning, and I learnt a great deal from him about the editorial process and the life of the journal. Now the time has come for me to take on the responsibility from Mario, and to continue with his task.
Of course, I will need his expertise and the continuous support of the Editorial Board in order to improve the quality of the journal still further. A first step will be to invite new people to the team, with the aim of bringing new areas of expertise and renewed enthusiasm to the journal. The second step will be to improve the visibility of published papers, taking advantage of new technologies. Our commitment is to serve the respiratory community by providing a top quality and reliable scientific publication, and at the same time we aim to foster an easy and efficient relationship with our authors.
Allow me to introduce myself. I am a pulmonologist devoted to clinical research, working as senior researcher at the Institut d’Investigacions Biomèdiques August Pi i Sunyer (IDIBAPS) at the Hospital Clínic in Barcelona, Spain. My field of work is chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), respiratory infections and alpha-1- antitrypsin deficiency. I have played a number of roles in national and international respiratory scientific societies, and those interested will find my complete list of publications in PubMed by searching for ‘Miravitlles M’.
When confronted with this new task, my first thought was that some of my colleagues may think that we have enough journals, or even too many, and that reading the papers published in the first quartile journals is more than enough to remain updated in our field. It is clear that the best ranked journals receive the best manuscripts, but it is also true that their possibilities are limited, with a rejection rate that can be higher than 75%. This means that most good research work would never be published if we did not have other valid options. If we look around, in the ISI Web of Knowledge there are 114 journals listed under the term Cardiology, and 72 under Gastroenterology and Hepatology, compared with 46 for Respiratory Medicine. Set against that, the impact of chronic respiratory diseases is one of the largest worldwide, and it is still growing. It is estimated that over 1 billion people of all ages suffer from chronic respiratory diseases, and that 4 million people died prematurely from those conditions in 2005 [Bousquet et al. 2010]. In this context, institutions such as the European Respiratory Society have developed a roadmap of respiratory disease, with the aim to provide guidance to health policy makers on what action needs to be taken to deal with the problem of chronic respiratory diseases in the next two decades [Decramer et al. 2011]. One of the main aspects is to stimulate biomedical research, and indeed respiratory medicine is a very active field with an increase in the number of publications of 33% between 1995 and 2003 [Michalopoulos and Falagas, 2005]. This growing number of publications requires journals to provide a way of disseminating the information. Therapeutic Advances in Respiratory Disease will provide an effective way of presenting high-quality research in the field of respiratory medicine and the Editorial Board and the new Editor in Chief are committed to this objective.