Commentary: Message from the ILAE president

It is a great privilege for me to announce the birth of Epilepsia Open, the open-access journal of the League. In the accompanying editorial, the editors explain in some detail the many reasons for establishing this new journal. In short, Epilepsia Open is a response to a call from our community, which believed that the League’s preexisting publication portfolio was insufficient to host the ever-increasing amount of high-quality epilepsy research being conducted throughout the world. At the same time, with the ongoing shift from subscription journals to open-access journals, the League needed to invest in the open-access model to maintain its leadership in the epilepsy global publication arena. By publishing in Epilepsia Open, authors can ensure that their research is readily accessible to the entire scientific community without any subscription fee, thereby enhancing the global visibility of their work and, ultimately, their citation index. As a further advantage, the new journal will make such research available to people with epilepsy, their families, and other lay readers who would otherwise have no means to access it free of charge. The birth of Epilepsia Open did not occur overnight. It is, on the contrary, the outcome of several years of discussion and preparation work within the League’s leadership and the League’s broader constituency and stakeholders. I am immensely grateful to the ILAE Executive Committee, to the members of the Publication Task Force, to the editors of all our journals (including the previous Epilepsia editors, Philip Schwartzkroin and Simon Shorvon, who started discussions on this initiative), and to our publisher Wiley for their contribution and support in making Epilepsia Open a reality. Epilepsia Open will be managed by an outstanding international team of editors in chief and associate editors, covering a wide range of scientific expertise. I am grateful to them all for accepting the challenge to lead the new journal to great heights. It is appropriate that the first typeset article now accessible in Epilepsia Open is a commentary of great interest and importance to our constituency that deals with the process leading to the new Classification of the Epilepsies. This process has been a long and winding road, which involved broad engagement and extensive feedback from our community. The report by Dr. Scheffer in Epilepsia Open explains how we have been listening to such feedback, how the classification framework has been revised accordingly, and which issues still require public engagement and consultation. I invite you to access this article and let us have your comments over the coming weeks so that we can consider them in finalizing the new classification. There is no better way than with Dr. Scheffer’s commentary to celebrate the birth of the new journal and to welcome Epilepsia Open to the family of League publications.