EDITORIAL

Abstract

This issue marks the third of our review articles written by presidents and immediate past presidents of the four leading international respiratory societies, namely the American Thoracic Society, the American Academy of Chest Physicians, the Asian Pacific Society of Respirology and the European Respiratory Society. Professor Sharon Rounds is the immediate past president of the American Thoracic Society. Professor Rounds is chief of Pulmonary/Critical Care at the Providence VA Medical Centre and is also Associate Dean of Medicine for the Medical Faculty and Professor of Medicine and of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at Brown Medical School. Her Research group, in the Pulmonary Vascular Research Laboratory, studies mechanisms of pulmonary vascular injury with a focus on mechanisms of endothelial cell injury. Her co-authors are Dr James R. Klinger and Dr Kevin B. Martin. Dr Klinger is Associate Professor of Medicine at Brown Medical School. His research interests include the mechanisms of pulmonary vascular response to hypoxia and clinical studies of pulmonary arterial hypertension. Dr Martin is a pulmonary/critical care postdoctoral fellow at Brown Medical School. Professor Rounds and her co-authors have an extensive publication record and together they have provided us with new insights and new hopes into the mechanisms and management of ‘pulmonary arterial hypertension’. As is the tradition in Respirology, this issue features a special Editorial from one of our newly appointed Associate Editors Dr Y.C. Gary Lee. Dr Lee joined our team in April 2005 and was also a co-editor of the very successful pleural disease review series published in Respirology last year. He is a respiratory physician at University College London working in Geoff Laurent's laboratory as well as carrying out clinical studies in Oxford. He holds a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellowship. Dr Lee has made a major contribution to our understanding of pleural adhesions and pleurodesis. He is the co-editor of one of the definitive textbooks on pleural disease. His editorial is entitled ‘Pleural disease: a forgotten frontier in respiratory research’. We are delighted with the excellent review of all clinical papers published in 2005 by Dr Gary Lee and Professor Richard Beasley. Submission to Respirology can be made online as of 1 November 2005, and from 1 January 2006 it will be the only system available to authors. Online submissions will be made through the very user-friendly ScholarOne. We expect that this will allow our turnaround time to be vastly improved and the whole review process will be more transparent as authors will be able to check the status of their manuscript live. To submit a new manuscript or check the status of a submitted manuscript log on to manuscript central at: http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/res If you need assistance, have lost your login details or have any problem with the new system, you can contact the Editorial Office at: respirol@cyllene.uwa.edu.au We hope you enjoy using this new system and that you agree that this is another important improvement in our Journal.