The successful trajectory of ABRASCO in representing the Brazilian Public Health community is expressed through the multiple activities of the articulated set of disciplinary fields comprising it. The work developed by the successive leaders, supported also by well-defined work committees and side by side with the allied movements of the Health Reform, has provided substantive elements for the definition and implementation of public health policies in Brazil with repercussions beyond our borders.

In the specific case of epidemiology, the Committee set in 1984 represented and still represents an important forum for the development and proposal of policies for the sustainable development of this discipline, having as a central guideline its inseparable articulation with the remaining disciplinary field of modern Public Health. Under this perspective, one of the greatest accomplishments of the Committee is expressed through the creation and support of the Brazilian Journal of Epidemiology ( Revista Brasileira de Epidemiologia - RBE). Despite the challenges in order to maintain regularity and continuity of national journals, the RBE has overcome difficulties (which, currently and especially, are in the financial sustainability and practically forces us to restrict the edition to an exclusively electronic channel, once that the printed edition has been dropped out) and has consolidated itself as an instrument for dissemination and technical and scientific disclosure, indexed in MEDLINE/PubMed, SciELO, Scopus and LILACS.

In order to expand and improve the functions of RBE and inspired on debates promoted by the newly created Forum of Magazines on Public Health, we, scientific editors, chose to implement initiatives to be presented to the overall scientific community and to Public Health in particular.

The first step taken was to review the editorial board. Thus, we promoted a wide review of the associated editors. With the responsibility of technically supporting the scientific editors, we reorganized, with wide support from the members of the community, the associated Publisher, based on an expressive set of thematic areas which comprise Epidemiology and which are expressed substantially in RBE publications. With an updated associated editorial board, we intend to have greater consistency and agility on the analysis of works submitted, eliminating the long time taken to reply to our researchers. It is notorious the difficulty we go through in order to do this exam, due to, among other, the overload our employees experience. The wider distribution among editors should facilitate overcoming this narrowed pathway. By covering thematic areas, we also establish as a principle having a editorial board with broad regional representation.

Also, we promote the updating and restoration o four body of advisors, consisting of Brazilian and foreign epidemiologists who, recognizing the importance of the RBE, quickly joined the Idea of putting together a group of advisers. From this group, contribution are expected for the improvement of the RBE, as well as actions and initiatives which allow ensuring the sustainability of the journal.

The RBE maintains the perspective, at the extent of their financial sustainability, of increasing the number of annual publications, which is necessary in order to vent the growing demand for qualified works submitted due to the apparent growth of researchers in the area. Likewise, we aim at preserving the acceptance of publications in the three languages our readers usually use, namely, Portuguese, Spanish and English. Considering the possibilities that the indexing bases allow, the texts in Portuguese and Spanish will have a parallel version in English, in order to expand the expected visibility of the production registered.

The line of publication will focus, as it already does, on original articles, including review articles. Sections of debate, notes and information, brief communications and letters to the editors will continue to be contemplated. We have also introduced some changes in the section of instructions to the authors, adopting parameters for the publication of articles with the use of the STrengthening the Reporting of OBservational studies in Epidemiology (STROBE) for observational studies, the CONSORT for clinical trials and the QUORUM for systematic reviews. With the objective of also better predict the cost of publishing, we adopted a limit of 21,600 characters per article.

At the dawn of the 19^th years of existence of the RBE, we express our hope for the system of science and technology of the country to be able to sustain the advances made in recent years and for the continuous progress and growing consolidation, opening up new perspectives for real sustainability of the national journals.

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