A new year, new challenges, a renewed journal?

Excerpt

The European Journal of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases is a healthy journal, with over 600 submitted manuscripts annually. Most of these papers are in the clinical microbiology sector (59%), with manuscripts on virology (15%) and fungal infections (10%) ranking second and third. However, over 50% of this impressive input has to be rejected immediately and, among the manuscripts that are sent out for peer review, another 30–40% will, in the end, not be acceptable for publication. Primarily, this is related to the relative quality of the various submissions: some are simply better than others and our review process is aimed at selecting these top papers. On the other hand, we are faced with a continuously increasing number of submissions, an increase that is significantly larger than what we will ever be able to publish in the end. As a result, we are now facing a backlog with respect to ‘paper publication,’ although our electronic publishing system is as timely as it could ever be: within three weeks of acceptance of your manuscripts, these will be listed in PubMed and will also be directly downloadable from that resource. We explain the backlog as being the visible result of the increasing quality of the submitted manuscripts. In order to accommodate for this higher level of page consumption, Springer, our publisher, will allow a 5% increase of our page budget for 2009. …