Changes for the Future.

Abstract

This first issue of 2016 marks the beginning of Volume 6 for Global Spine Journal (GSJ) and this new volume brings in new and exciting changes. As many of you may know, we merged with Evidence-Based Spine-Care Journal (EBSJ) in 2015 and became one publication under the name Global Spine Journal. Last year EBSJ was featured as GSJ's special edition, publishing twice a year. However, in 2016 and moving forward, the Editorial Board has made the decision to merge the two journals further. Starting with this issue, most issues of the journal will have a mixture of GSJ and EBSJ content, featuring a special EBSJ section. The decision to eliminate case reports in both GSJ and EBSJ in 2015 meant that both publications had open space. This open space allowed for the unique opportunity to truly combine the two journals. This merge means that the issues will feature a greater diversity of content for our readers and will strengthen the quality of the journal overall. Since its founding in 2011, GSJ has rapidly grown, changed, and expanded each year. We have experienced a huge insurgence of manuscript submissions in the last year. Due to the increase of articles, we are now able to expand the journal further. In 2016, we will be moving from 6 issues per year to 8 issues per year. We are very excited about the opportunity to expand the journal, and we are looking forward to providing our readers with more issues and also allowing our authors to wait a shorter amount of time to be published. Along with the above changes, we will also be merging our Editorial Manager system into one account for the journal. In the past, GSJ and EBSJ had separate accounts, but we have decided to streamline everything into one account. You will be able to choose whether you are submitting to GSJ or EBSJ. All submissions can be submitted to www.editorialmanager.com/gsj. We are so excited about these changes and the journal's future. We would like to thank all of our authors for their excellent and high-quality submissions; without all of you, we wouldn't be here today. We hope you all enjoy our first fully merged issue.