Changes at health policy and planning.

Last year we commissioned a strategic review of Health Policy and Planning (HPP) to better position our journal in an increasingly complex publishing landscape and enhance its relevance and impact. As part of this review, we surveyed our readers, authors and editorial board. We also compared HPP against 13 competitors with respect to (1) performance indicators, (2) submission number and acceptance rate, (3) editorial structure, (4) governance structures, (5) turnaround decision and publication times, (6) geographical focus of readership and authorship, (7) financing, (8) range of web-based features, (9) assessment of research impact, (10) engagement in capacity building of authors from lowand middle-income countries, and (11) marketing practices. It clearly emerged from this strategic exercise that HPP ranks very well in comparison with other journals in the field. With an impact factor of 2.79 in 2010 and immediacy index of 1.069 in 2010, the articles published in HPP are cited more frequently and much earlier in peer-reviewed journals than the articles published by the majority of its competitors. Furthermore, the number of submissions to HPP nearly doubled between 2008 and 2011. However, findings from the strategic review revealed some gaps. The growing popularity of HPP is good news, but the increasingly large number of submissions has also become a significant challenge for our team of editors, which until recently consisted of only two co-Editors-in-Chief. In light of this, we decided to expand our team of editors and recruited eight new editors, who will be joining our editorial team as Section Editors between September and November 2012. They will work in pairs as experts in one of the following areas: Health Systems Research, Health Economics, Health Policy, and Evaluation and Implementation Research. We include a brief introduction to our new Section Editors at the bottom of this editorial. We would also like to take this opportunity to inform you that we now have on board a statistical adviser, Andrew Hutchings, who is a Lecturer at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. We hope that this substantial restructuring will help refine the quality of our reviewing process and speed up our decision and publications times. It also emerged from the review that HPP has underused new social media and other web-based applications to connect with