LASER THERAPY MARCHES ON!

Abstract

My dear friends and colleagues, faithful readers, welcome to the second issue of the 21st volume of Laser Therapy. If I look back 23 years, nearly a quarter of a century, to March of 1989, the first words I ever wrote in Volume 1 No 1 as the founding Editor-in-Chief of the journal were; “Laser Therapy is on the march!” In fact, I wrote more or less the same for the Editorial to the first issue of Volume 14, back in April of 2005, when we resurrected the journal and its masthead from the disrepair into which it had fallen. Back then, we had 48 pages per issue and, true to my promise, we first increased the page count to 60, and now it is up to 84 pages, so we are indeed still on the march. In 1989 the journal was the official organ of the International Laser Therapy Association, ILTA, and then for a while, the World Association for Laser Therapy (WALT). In 2005, however, we were the official journal for no association, but now we proudly count 6 journals who use Laser Therapy as their official organ, which started with the International Phototherapy Association (IPTA) from Volume 15, issue 4, to which have been added the International Society for Laser Surgery and Medicine (ISLSM), the World Federation of Societies for Laser Medicine and Surgery (WFSLMS), the Asian-Pacific Association for Laser Medicine and Surgery (APALMS), the Japan Society for Laser Reproduction (JaSLaR) and the Japan Association for Laser Medicine and Sports Science (JALMSS). Probably the greatest step forward in the onward march of the journal was our acceptance for listing in J-STAGE (Japan Science and Technology Information Aggregator, Electronic), and now we can offer articles online up to and including issue 1 of Volume 5 (1993). J-STAGE is working hard to get the remaining volumes scanned and online. All of these journal articles are fully searchable by title, author and keyword. Furthermore, all articles and items in the journal, with the exception of those less than 6 months old at the time of searching, are available freely as open access articles in downloadable and printable PDF files. Those less than 6 months old can be downloaded on a reasonable fee per article basis. We believe this provides a valuable resource to all those researching the field of photomedicine and photosurgery. A further major triumph is the adoption by J-STAGE of the XML language for indexing journals, and as a result, Laser Therapy has already passed the first 2 of 3 hurdles for indexing on PubMed. This is of course an enormous step forward, and not only will it ensure the journal's gaining a higher impact factor, but it will also mean that from the final stage of our acceptance, authors and articles appearing in Laser Therapy will be indexed and searchable in PubMed. Laser Therapy is truly on the march!