Raising the benchmark

Abstract

Dear readers and members of the transplantation community, As always at the beginning of the year, we would like to take the opportunity to inform you of the recent progress in Transplant International’s growth. The upward trend that started with the re-launch of the Journal in 2005 has continued in 2008 with several significant developments: For the first time, a complete issue has been compiled that is entirely dedicated to a single topic of high interest. We would like to thank our Guest Editors, Rainer Oberbauer and Jan Lerut, for managing the January 2009 issue, which contains 11 Review Articles by leading experts in the field of minimization of immunosuppression. We hope that this issue meets with your interest and we welcome your feedback. In addition to the review articles published in the January issue, we continue our policy of including one to two high-quality review articles in every issue as well as frequent invited commentaries by top experts in the field. Transplant International’s impact factor continues to rise and is now at 2.3 (an increase of 29% since the re-launch). Likewise, manuscript submissions have continued to grow substantially and exceeded 550 in 2008 (ca 130% increase since the re-launch). This increase has made a stricter peer-review selection possible and has led to a noticeable rise in the quality of published papers (acceptance rate is currently ca 30%). The positive developments of the journal would not be possible without our dedicated team of Associate Editors. We thank Jan Langrehr and Per Pfeffer for their commitment as Associate Editors in the past years and look forward to their continuing support as new members of the Editorial Board. We welcome our new Associate Editors: Johann Pratschke and Patrizia Burra. We are confident that we are well on our way towards the goal of positioning Transplant International among the leading scientific journals in the field of transplantation. However, it is only through the valuable contribution of the scientific community that our goal of making it to the top ranks can indeed be achieved. Thus, we appeal to you to support the promising development of Transplant International by citing its excellent manuscripts in your own scientific work and by submitting some of your best manuscripts for peer review and publication. The journal possesses top-quality journal services, ensures broad exposure of its published material, gives prompt and personal attention to all queries and – of greatest importance – stresses a fair and fast review process.