The European Thyroid Journal in Its Third Year of Publication: A Thriving Enterprise

Abstract

The European Thyroid Journal (ETJ) is now entering its third year of publication, and I am happy to report the journal is doing rather well. Last year we received more submissions than in the first year of publication, and consequently the rejection rate has gone up to 57%. In 2013 we published 3 Editorials, 3 European Thyroid Association (ETA) Guidelines, 9 Reviews (3 on basic, 2 on translational, and 4 on clinical topics in thyroidology), 18 Original Papers, and 4 Letters to the Editor. To evaluate how the journal is appreciated by its readership, a questionnaire was given to participants of the annual meeting of the ETA in Leiden in September 2013. It turned out that reviews and guidelines were the most-liked sections. I also find the authoritative reviews very appealing, and the vast majority of the respondents found the guidelines quite useful for their own practice. I would like to add that the ETA Guidelines are freely accessible to everyone via the publisher's website: www.karger.com/etj. All other ETJ papers are also freely accessible if you are an ETA member (go to the membership section of www.eurothyroid.com) – a good (and economically very sound) reason to join the ETA if you are not already a member. The survey also found that the respondents liked (ranked by frequency): ETJ being the official ETA journal, no submission or page charges, the short interval between submission and first decision, and the broad spectrum of topics. One person, however, did not like the cover of the print version of ETJ. I would like to thank our 2013 reviewers (see list below) for their thoughtful comments – they really are the guardians of the quality of our published papers. It is against this background that I would like to draw your attention to the issue of open access to published papers. Of course, we all support such policies when feasible. However, we are presently seeing an explosion of free access journals, and many of them, unfortunately, are purely commercially driven and willing to publish anything – even against the advice of reviewers – as long as the authors pay the requested page charges (often in the order of USD 1,000 and more). Such developments seriously undermine the very principles of open access journals, and you should be aware of the bad sides of some of these electronic commercial journals. This issue was elucidated very well in a recent commentary in the New England Journal of Medicine [2013;368:791]. Therefore, if you are asked to contribute to one of these journals, think twice: ETJ is most likely a better choice in view of the absence of page charges and the presence of qualified feedback from reviewers (which almost always does improve the quality of your paper). Together with the Associate Editors Josef Koehrle, Luca Persani, Peter Laurberg, and Furio Pacini, we are anticipating that the third volume of ETJ will be even more attractive than its two predecessors.