New year resolutions.

THE JOURNAL We received 1839 submissions in 2010. Outright rejections were 41% and eventual acceptance rate was 16%. Time from submission to first decision was 26 days (54 days for reviewed papers). We received submissions from all round the world, reflecting our International standing, and the main areas were UK 27%, USA 10%, Italy 6%, Netherlands 5%, China 5% and Japan 4%. We are particularly grateful to the Associate and Deputy Editors and the reviewers, without whom the Journal would not function. A particular thanks to our statistical team, Drs Gibson, McKeever and Tata from Nottingham. They have provided superb and prompt reviews, and majorly contributed to keeping the manuscript quality high. Thanks also to Dr Jenny Quint who has done such an excellent job with ‘lung alerts’ and Mark FitzGerald who has kept the flow of fascinating Images, Case reports and Pulmonary puzzles going. We have appointed an entirely new Editorial Board and have had two excellent editorial meetings in Barcelona, with lots of energy and ideas. We want to take these forward in 2011. Our aim is to keep getting the content right, and see that reflected in a rising impact factor. We are also grateful to our Journal support staff, in particular Claire Weinberg and Sarah Szatkowski, who are unfailingly patient with our foibles. We are aware we are still too slow, however, and that this is not fair in particular to junior authors. This will be helped by our switch to ScholarOne from Benchpress early in 2011. The new system is infinitely preferred by virtually everyone who has used both. We also are aware of production difficultiesdthe abstract book for the winter meeting arrived after we had set out for the final day! We aim to get manuscripts on line much quicker, with e-alerts when a new paper goes on-line. We have had really helpful talks with Allison Lang from the publishing side, and we hope we will make progress on this too.