Abstract
It is a great honor to pen few words for the recent dramatic evolution of the Journal of Gastroenterology (JG). JG is the official journal of the Japanese Society of Gastroenterology (JSGE). It was launched in 1966 as Gastroenterologia Japonica, and then the journal name was changed to Journal of Gastroenterology in 1994, and has completed 50 years of publication in 2015. Only 10 years ago, no one could have imagined the current situation of JG. When I joined in the editorial team of JG in 2003, the journal had approximately 350 manuscript submissions per year. It was substantially a Japanese journal with 80 % of the submitted manuscripts and 90 % of the accepted manuscripts coming from Japanese gastroenterologists. Very few foreign researchers even know the name of the journal. I would like to let you know indispensable decisions and efforts of former Presidents of the JSGE, Editorial Directors, Editor-in-Chief, Deputy Editor-in-Chief, associate editors and editorial stuffs of JG to make JG put on the success process. With Professor Tsutomu Chiba (Kyoto University), the previous Editor-in-Chief of JG, and Professor Yutaka Atomi (Kyorin University), the President of the JSGE at that time, we seriously discussed the short-term target and future prospects of the journal. We decided that the development of the journal would be the flagship for the internationalization of the JSGE. Professor Chiba kindly and surprisingly recommended me as the youngest Editorin-Chief in JG’s history. I became an Editor-in-Chief in April of 2005 and finished a 6-year term in March of 2011. I had thought that our success depended on our team of associated editors. Professor Makoto Ohtsuki (Emeritus Professor University of Occupational and Environmental Health), Editorial Director at that time, asked the president of the JSGE to increase the number of associated editors, and change all members into young and promising investigators. With continuous enthusiasm to JG and encouragement to associate editors by the superb Deputy Editorin-Chief, Professor Kazuhiko Koike (Tokyo University), Professor Sumio Watanabe (Juntendo University), and associate editors had been working tremendously hard to establish JG to be an international journal. Most of the associate editors were either associate or assistant professors at that time, but now more than half of them became full professors of the Department of Gastroenterology and Hepatology in the many major universities in all over Japan. We made every effort to make the system based on peer reviews. We introduced an online system for JG and changed the cover of the journal in 2005. We also introduced the ‘‘online first’’ system in 2009 and the Open Choice service to make excellent manuscripts open access in 2011. We pushed associate editors to make quick decisions and subsequently the average time from submission to first decision in 2013 was 20 days. In my term as Editor-inChief of JG, we established a strict initial evaluation process by the editor. Even the Editor-in-Chief and Deputy Editor-in-Chief had also made decision by themselves for 15–20 manuscripts per week. More than 70 % of the submitted papers were immediately rejected. We decided to eliminate most retrospective clinical studies without establishing new concepts and some prospective clinical studies with only a small number of subjects. With these efforts, the acceptance rate of JG was significantly decreased from 25.8 % in 2004 to 12.7 % in 2013. We made every effort to let many foreign leaders of gastroenterology M. Watanabe (&) Department of Gastroenterology and Hepatology, Tokyo Medical Dental University, Bunkyo, Japan e-mail: mamoru.gast@tmd.ac.jp
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