Inaugural Editorial

am honored to humbly take on the position as the Editor-in-Chief for this new open access peer reviewed journal, Diabetic Foot & Ankle. My main inspiration for developing this type of a journal was to bring together the knowledge, expertise and research that are emerging on this subject in a single forum and thus to support an exchange between colleagues around the world who have an interest in the management of diabetic foot and ankle complications. The need for such a forum became apparent to me after completing the textbook Surgical Reconstruction of the Diabetic Foot and Ankle for which I was Editor. To bring together, as I did then, the foremost experts, made me want to create a new way of collaborating with health care professionals worldwide engaged in this field and thus ultimately to establish better preventive and treatment options for the diabetic population. Diabetic Foot & Ankle fosters collaboration by utilizing open access as a vehicle for delivering high quality articles and research to the global community of physicians, educators, and allied health care professionals as well as to patient groups, policy makers and the media. Diabetic Foot & Ankle will feature all levels of evidence-based medicine and will aid in the improvement of health and quality of life in people with diabetic foot and ankle conditions globally. It will publish original clinical and basic science research, analyses and reviews, case reports, surgical techniques, practice updates, novel practice guidelines and thought-provoking editorials. Being open access and thereby freely available on the Internet to many different research communities, I foresee a cross-fertilization that will lead to novel and perhaps unexpected approaches to help patients with foot and ankle disability due to diabetes. Co-Action Publishing, the publisher of Diabetic Foot & Ankle, works actively with indexing and coverage of journals in numerous databases. We expect the journal to be included in PubMed Central/PubMed at the National Library of Medicine within a year from now. This will support permanent archiving and increase the distribution of articles published in the journal. Further indexing will take place as soon as content allows for it. I believe that Diabetic Foot & Ankle will have a tremendous impact globally and will become the premier peer-reviewed international forum for the dissemination of information on the latest advances pertinent to diabetic foot and ankle pathology and its related areas of prevention, clinical care, pathophysiology, epidemiology , …