Wisdom of Snake

2013 is the year of the snake in the lunar calendar. The snake symbolizes many things in both Eastern and Western mythologies. Especially in Eastern Asia, snakes are respected as a symbol of harvest and fertility, whereas in Greek mythology, snakes have symbolic significance in science. Just as a snake sheds its old skin, the Korean Journal of Urology (KJU) in 2013 plans to mature with an upgraded home page and improved contents, thus aspiring to become one of the best international journals in the field of urology. KJU is striving to be a rapid, open access international journal and plans to develop strategies to enhance online publishing. Rapid publication is an important consideration for novel research. Therefore, KJU welcomes the receipt of articles that need to be published in a short period of time. The " Rapid Communications " section of the KJU will include articles of utmost importance that present exciting findings in urology. KJU provides international readers access to Asian data on various urological diseases. Furthermore, we welcome article submissions from all over the world. Recently, international articles in the KJU increased about 20% to 30%. The major contributions were from Turkey, Japan, Australia, Iran, and India. KJU is indexed in Pubmed and Scopus and also in Pubmed Central and publishes open access articles, so that anybody with Internet access can read the articles and also freely use the contents for noncommercial purposes [1]. Recently, the expected impact factor of the KJU, which was rapidly increased after being indexed in Pubmed, increased by more than 0.5. The open access policy of the KJU has also contributed to expanding the base of readers internationally. Online publication plays an important role for readers in the era of SNS and smartphones. Online ahead publication provides the fastest route of publication and also offers novel research information to the public domain. KJU welcomes articles that contain video clips related to minimally invasive surgery and advanced surgical technique. Retrieval of video clips will be provided in the " Urology in Motion " section of the homepage. This section will be easily accessed via smartphones or the Internet. Publication ethics is a most important issue these days. KJU follows the guidelines of the " Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals. " All manuscripts submitted to KJU may be screened by use of CrossCheck for textual similarity to other previously published works. …