Out with the old, in with the new for the European Respiratory Review.

It’s a new year, it’s a new life for the European Respiratory Review (ERR) that sheds its skin, leaving its old format of a quarterly timetabled review to become more agile, creating a seamless and constant contact with our readers and authors: as of January 1 2017, the ERR will in fact commence publishing under a continuous model. This will lead to a decrease in the lag-time from acceptance to publication and the immediate transfer of articles to PubMed and other indexes. Each online issue will “open” at the beginning of a 3-month period and be “closed” at the end, at which point the printed version of the issue will be produced. For example, this editorial is the first article in the issue that opens in January 2017, and that will be closed and printed in March. At present, the average time from submission to first decision for manuscripts submitted to the ERR is very short (6 days for immediate acceptance), while major and minor revisions require, on average, 27 and 26 days, respectively. For manuscripts that are rejected the decision time is only 13 days, thus allowing authors to pursue an alternative choice very quickly. However, the old quarterly format still required fixed timing and, until recently, after a manuscript was accepted for publication it was regularly left waiting for the issue to which it was assigned: weeks and sometimes months were likely to elapse. During this period the manuscript was neither available to the authors as a publication to be cited, nor to the scientific community. But that will no longer be the case. Once accepted and edited, the paper will be made available on the ERR website (http://err.ersjournals.com), meaning it will be instantly citable and published on all major databases. This model is also being adopted for the European Respiratory Journal [1].