EDITORIAL
A busy time for science editors
Enrico Alleva; Federica Napolitani
Istituto Superiore di Sanità, Rome, Italy
This is certainly a busy time for science editors who have to keep up with the latest trends in scientific publishing and face the many challenges of an ever changing landscape.
The publishing industry has been strongly affected by the amazing innovations brought about by the advancements in mobile communications technology and by the changes that they de facto produce in our everyday individual behaviour. The way we work, we search, we read and we communicate has entirely changed and is getting more and more different from what we were used to.
New editorial products, new business models, new publishing platforms are rapidly emerging. However, the right balance between traditional peer-review models and quality assurance, between open access and copyright issues, social networking and privacy, digitization and preservation, economic goals and ethical issues is in many cases still to be achieved.
The journal Annali dell'Istituto Superiore di Sanità, now publishing its fourty-ninth volume, is also following this debate very closely and is undergoing a number of improvements.
We proceed slowly but steadily. We received our first Impact Factor evaluation in 2010 and registered a considerable percentage growth in 2011. The number of articles submitted for publication is increasing as well as the PubMed hits count.
The new cover of the journal and the slightly redesigned format of the papers that the readers will find in this issue, and will hopefully appreciate, are a new small step forward in the journal's evolution and innovative plan.
In this somewhat disorientating and fast-changing scenario, our policy remains focused on disseminating the results of the researchers' studies (in the form of original articles, commentaries, reviews, case reports, brief notes) and on meeting the community of readers' expectations, in accordance with the ISS mission of protecting and improving public health in all its different aspects.