The EJCTS publication family is growing: the appointment of new editors for ICVTS and MMCTS.

Abstract

The European Association for Cardio-Thoracic Surgery (EACTS) was founded in 1986 [1] and soon after in July 1987, the first issue of its official scientific publication organ, the European Journal of Cardio-Thoracic Surgery (EJCTS) helmed by the then-Editorin-Chief, Hans Borst went into print. Since its inception, the Journal has progressed steadily under the guidance of its 4 Editors-in-Chief: Hans Borst, Marko Turina, Ludwig von Segesser and over the last 5 years, Friedhelm Beyersdorf. Its submission rate (Fig. 1), impact factor (Fig. 2) and the number of online downloads (Table 1) have shown healthy year-on-year growth, consequently catapulting EJCTS to one of the most prestigious scientific Journals in the field of thoracic and cardiovascular surgery. As the impact factor and number of submissions rose, the Editors soon found themselves being forced to become more selective, and having to reject papers that were of good scientific quality but of lesser priority or interest. This was the major driving factor that prompted then-Editor-in-Chief, Ludwig von Segesser, to create EJCTS’ first sister journal, the ‘Interactive CardioVascular and Thoracic Surgery’ (ICVTS) in 2002 with the intention of giving good papers that had been rejected from the main journal a good home [12–14]. In addition, as the title already suggested, it also included vascular topics and it was ‘interactive’, aimed at engaging the increasingly web-savvy, global audience, with freely accessible web content, supporting online videos, online commentaries (eComments) etc. In its early years, ICVTS was self-published by EACTS and functioned as an experimental platform where new features could be tested. But this ‘experiment’ quickly became a success story. In 2012, within 10 years of its initiation, it received its first impact factor of 1.112 [15], a major milestone for ICVTS (Fig. 2). Today, transferred manuscripts from the main journal compete with many independent submissions for a spot in this up-and-coming journal. In 2002, another publication organ also joined the EACTS family of journals: The Multimedia Manual of Cardio-Thoracic Surgery (MMCTS), the brain-child of former EJCTS Editor-in-Chief Marko Turina. His vision was to create a legitimate, video-based, peerreviewed scientific publication in contradistinction to various surgical movies which had started to appear on online platforms, such as YouTube. The journal would then go on to publish articles with minimal amount of text, but with extensive illustrative material, consisting of video clips and schematics, fully utilizing web potential of adding movement, colour and sounds to the published techniques, a possibility unmatched by paper-based textbooks.