The goal is to go further and do better: but how?

The changing face of the European Respiratory Review

Three years have now passed since I took up the post of Chief Editor of the European Respiratory Review (ERR), one of the best experiences in my professional career. When Vincent Cottin handed over the helm to me, the ERR was already in excellent condition after his brilliant leadership and that of his predecessor Marc Humbert. Throughout my term of office I have tried to further open up the ERR to professionals from other areas of medicine and to involve countries that in the past have been less sensitive to our publication; all this thanks to an editorial board made up of junior and senior experts with very different skills and backgrounds.

The changing face of the European Respiratory Reviewhttp://ow.ly/jmVi30mTLTC

Rare pulmonary diseases: a common fight

This issue of the European Respiratory Review (ERR ) includes selected articles from the 7th International Meeting on Pulmonary Rare Diseases and Orphan Drugs [1–8], as well as a Frontiers in Clinical Practice article addressing the rare disease pulmonary Langerhans cell histiocytosis (PLCH) [9].

Rare pulmonary diseases represent a major field of respiratory medicine http://ow.ly/djOX30e6DT0

Out with the old, in with the new for the European Respiratory Review

It's a new year, it's a new life for the European Respiratory Review (ERR) that sheds its skin, leaving its old format of a quarterly timetabled review to become more agile, creating a seamless and constant contact with our readers and authors: as of January 1 2017, the ERR will in fact commence publishing under a continuous model. This will lead to a decrease in the lag-time from acceptance to publication and the immediate transfer of articles to PubMed and other indexes. Each online issue will “open” at the beginning of a 3-month period and be “closed” at the end, at which point the printed version of the issue will be produced. For example, this editorial is the first article in the issue that opens in January 2017, and that will be closed and printed in March. At present, the average time from submission to first decision for manuscripts submitted to the ERR is very short (6 days for immediate acceptance), while major and minor revisions require, on average, 27 and 26 days, respectively. For manuscripts that are rejected the decision time is only 13 days, thus allowing authors to pursue an alternative choice very quickly. However, the old quarterly format still required fixed timing and, until recently, after a manuscript was accepted for publication it was regularly left waiting for the issue to which it was assigned: weeks and sometimes months were likely to elapse. During this period the manuscript was neither available to the authors as a publication to be cited, nor to the scientific community. But that will no longer be the case. Once accepted and edited, the paper will be made available on the ERR website (http://err.ersjournals.com), meaning it will be instantly citable and published on all major databases. This model is also being adopted for the European Respiratory Journal [1].

Out with the old, in with the new: the ERR is moving to continuous publicationhttp://ow.ly/Aago3079Jxd