We have become an Open Access journal!

It has been 4 years since Journal of Diabetes Investigation (JDI) was launched as a bimonthly journal in 2010, as the official journal of the Asian Association for the Study of Diabetes (AASD). Two years after the launch, the first Impact Factor was released with the evaluation of 1.861. Contributions come from all over the world, and in 2012 almost 300 papers per year as original articles have been submitted. The acceptance rate is approximately 30%. The development of JDI is slow – at a snail’s pace – but steady and encouraging progress is being made. The mission of our journal is summarized by the title of ‘Why do we need a new journal?’ in my editorial, as Editor-InChief, in the first issue of JDI in 2010. Part of the story is as follows: ‘It is now accepted that the achievement of better outcomes in prevention and treatment of diabetes must be made on the basis of evidence obtained from fundamental and clinical research. The extraordinary worldwide increase in type 2 diabetes predicted to occur from 2010 to 2030 also indicates the importance of paying attention to ethnic difference in the pathophysiology of the disease. An understanding of these differences in diabetes and complicating disease will improve management of patients. A number of studies suggest that there are significant differences in b-cell function, insulin resistance, degree of obesity, quantity of thrifty genes, frequency of cardiovascular diseases, and causes of death between Caucasians and Asians’. To date the launch of JDI has achieved some of these aims. A number of excellent papers regarding ethnic difference in the pathophysiology of the disease have been submitted and published during the past 4 years. Even if it is only a small part of the whole, I am sure our journal plays an important role among the many journals in the field of diabetes, providing valuable information about Asian people with diabetes and its related disorders. Whatever JDI contributes it will prove to be useful for the members of AASD, in both fundamental and clinical research, and patients’ management. However, I fear that such valuable information might not spread widely to the rest of the world because the journal is still too new and not yet wellknown in the academic community. The most recent impact factor for JDI was ranked only at 89 out of 122 in the same subject area. Therefore, it is of the utmost importance for the position JDI move up the ranking of journals in the subject area so that it can spread information on diabetes in Asia to the whole world. In a recent issue of ‘Science’, interesting information was reported in the article with the title of ‘The Rise of Open Access’. The following is my own rough interpretation and opinion of the main point of the article. According to the chronicle on the publishing of scholarly articles, the first issues of Nature and Science were published in 1864 and 1880, respectively, and all academic articles from before 1880 fit in just a few volumes – a list of papers published in 1880 would fill only 100 pages. Since then, the scientific publishing has grown considerably and today, a new paper is now published roughly every 20 seconds. It is difficult to conceive this state of enormous overproduction?