The only constant is change
Dear Reader, At the end of this year EJLST will complete its 10 th volume, an achievement that will be celebrated throughout next year. I am very proud to say that today EJLST has the highest ever impact factor with 1.345. It has matured into a truly international journal highly respected in the community and known for its competitive publication times.
When I started work with Wiley-VCH in February 2000, EJLST was the first journal I took over shortly after its relaunch -the predecessor being Fett/Lipid. We had about a quarter of the submissions we receive today and published only half the number of pages. EJLST's first impact factor with 0.885 at the time -while better than some of the smaller competitors -could not compete with JAOCS or Lipids. Last but not least everything was done 'by hand', i.e. letters and faxes.
This has changed drastically. As the daughter of an IBM system engineer I started out with putting communication on an e-only basis within half a year. This was followed by an in-house online submission system in 2002 and the introduction of the highly sophisticated, full online editorial office system MS Central -recently renamed ScholarOne Manuscripts -mid-2005. I do not know what I would have done without it. It really eased the workload for the editors and myself and made it possible to continuously improve publication statistics.
In parallel, EJLST became truly international and widened its scope considerably. Where we had about one third of submissions coming from Germany in 2000, we now receive more than half our submissions from outside Europe. We started out as a very technical and chemical journal and are currently on the best way to covering the full breadth of lipids, fats and oils. To continue to further the latter we have a new editor since May this year. Her name is Susan Carlson, she is American and will be in charge of all health-related submissions. She will introduce herself in one of our next editorials.
All this was made possible by the great teams I had/have the honor of working with. With Fritz Spener as the Editor-in-Chief for the first seven years, EJLST