Farewell and recognitions from the Editor in Chief

Abstract

It was a privilege to serve Medical and Biological Engineering and Computing, the official journal of the International Federation of Medical and Biological Engineering, IFMBE. When the new Editorial team took over in July 2005 from Alan Murray, many changes were implemented. The most important one was the introduction of Web-based handling of the manuscripts. This allowed a faster response from authors and much better communication between editor and his associates as well as the reviewers. One of the aims of the new editorial team was to improve the Impact Factor of the journal but not at the expense of indices that were already good such as the cited half life which was and remained close to 10 years [1]. The impact factor went up from about 1 to 1.89, a substantial increase indeed. It makes no sense to speculate on why it did not increase further. What did really happen was a rapid doubling of the number of submissions over this editorial period. It demonstrates the pressure we are all experiencing to publish. However, the quality of the increased paper flow is not always as high as previously. I would like to thank whole heartedly the reviewers who worked so hard for the journal. The increased number of papers did put a high demand on reviewers. We implemented editorial triage to reduce the amount of review requests and to increase the quality of papers that went out for review. We have listed the 103 reviewers who wrote one or more review per year in average over the last 6 years in Appendix Table 1. Those 559 reviewers who helped us out in 2012 are listed in Appendix Table 2. The editorial board should be recognized as well. We have used the services of these members in case there was uncertainty in the review process and critical advice was needed. I like to express gratitude towards the associate editors. We started out with Ruben Coronel, Maria Siebes, Jenny Dankelman and Ed van Bavel. It was my choice to have this first team geographically close as to optimize communication. Nico Schellart joined somewhat later. After the first 3 years, Jenny and Ed left the team and were replaced by Dario Farina from Denmark and Andreas Wahle from Iowa, USA. All these associate editors had their specialty and took part of the editorial load. However, I like to thank especially Ruben Coronel for his support. Ruben is a born editor with a very mature judgment and a high efficiency in decision making. His collegiality was always refreshing which became also clear when the delay in nomination of a new Editor in Chief and the steady increase in submission resulted in too high a burden for the Editor in Chief. Ruben took care of all new submissions since Sept 1 2012. The IFMBE owns the journal and considers it its Flagship. Although the direct responsibility of the journal is with the Federal Journal Committee, FJC, the four presidents of the IFMBE who were involved in my editorial period showed all direct interest in the journal be it in different intensity. Joachim Nagel, Makoto Kikuchi, Herb Voigt and since recently Ratko Magjarevic. Joachim did put in a tremendous effort in realizing the journal transition but I would like to recognize especially Makoto Kikuchi and Herb Voigt for their understanding and support for Editorial affairs. To me, it is very clear that the Founding Fathers of the IFMBE were wise in having the rules of engagement between IFMBE and Editors spelled out in the constitution. The FJC has been constructed as a committee with own responsibility towards the journal. In my opinion, this J. A. E. Spaan (&) Department of Biomedical Engineering, Academic Medical Center, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands e-mail: j.a.spaan@amc.uva.nl