10th anniversary of allergy, asthma & clinical immunology

The Canadian Society of Allergy & Clinical Immunology, founded in 1945, published its first Journal in 1996, as the Canadian Journal of Allergy & Clinical Immunology, under the Editorship of Dr Gordon Sussman. It was a hard copy journal containing mostly solicited manuscripts and its circulation was limited primarily to Society members. In 2004, Allergy, Asthma & Clinical Immunology (AACI) was founded, and was published by BC Decker from that year until 2009. In 2009, a decision was made to change to an electronic format and the Journal joined BioMed Central. It is interesting to note that a number of our most accessed papers were originally submitted to the hard copy version of the Journal produced by BC Decker (see Table 1). These articles became generally available because of Open Access with BioMed Central. This demonstrates the importance of the Open Access system for the dissemination of medical and scientific information, for at its peak, the hard copy of AACI never had more than a few hundred subscribers, compared to the 20,000 to 35,000 accesses to the articles when they transferred to an electronic format. Since joining BioMed Central, under the Editorships of Drs. Warrington, Kim & Watson, Allergy Asthma & Clinical Immunology has been indexed on PubMed, PubMed Central, Science Citation Index Expanded, Current