An update for the cerebrovascular community.

As I begin my fourth year as editor-in-chief of Stroke, I look back over what has been accomplished during the past 3 years and forward to what can be done to improve the quality and impact of the journal for all the constituents of the cerebrovascular community. Stroke has led the way among journals in the vascular/neuroscience disciplines in striving to improve the quality and reproducibility of preclinical research, as detailed in the recent special report by Howells and Macleod. Several new features have been added to the journal during the past 3 years, including, most recently, a monthly synopsis of important preclinical and clinical papers related to cerebrovascular disorders that have appeared in other journals. Over the next few months, several other new and innovative features will appear, primarily in the electronic version of Stroke. These new ventures will attempt to expand the use of Stroke to our readers and provide additional venues to improve the education of more junior members of the cerebrovascular community. The time to making an initial editorial decision of articles submitted to Stroke has been substantially reduced, as has the time to both electronic and print publication of accepted articles. All these improvements are testaments to the dedication and hard work of the highly dedicated group of associate editors and our vice-editor Karen Furie, as well as the editorial board, section editors, consulting editors, and assistant editors. I thank all of them for their diligence and timely evaluation of submitted articles. Stroke functions efficiently because of the dedication of our managing editor, Rebecca Seastrong, and our editorial assistant, Amy Invernizzi. I greatly appreciate their help, and without them, producing a high-quality, influential journal for the cerebrovascular disorders community would not be possible. July marks a time of passage for the members of the editorial board and other masthead groups that reinforce the concept that Stroke and its contributors are continually evolving. I thank our outgoing editorial board members, Andrei V. Alexandrov, Masoud Amiri, Philip M. Bath, Anish Bhardwaj, Ángel Chamorro, Maria Grazia De Simoni, Andrew M. Demchuk, Jochen B. Fiebach, John Hallenbeck, Tobias Kurth, Thaddeus Nowak, Peter D. Schellinger, and Rüdiger von Kummer, for their valuable service to the journal during their tenure on the board. I would also like to welcome the new members of the board, Harry Cloft, Deidre Anne De Silva, Peter U. Heuschmann, Scott E. Kasner, Maarten Lansberg, Thomas W. Leung, Maria A. Moro, Jean-Marc Olivot, Mark Parsons, Sarah Pendlebury, Cathy M. Stinear, Danilo Toni, and Xiaoying Wang, and look forward to working with them. I also thank our outgoing section editors, Dick Traystman and Wade Smith, for their help during the past 3 years and welcome our new section editors Midori Yenari for translational medicine and Kyra Becker for critical care and emergency medicine. Finally, I thank Hugh Markus and Werner Hacke for their help as consulting editors and welcome our new consulting editors, Donna Ferriero, Markku Kaste, and Tatianna Rundek. With the help of all the members of our various masthead groups and the cerebrovascular community, I will strive to continue to improve the content and scope of Stroke during the next few years.