While writing my last editorial for Diabetes Care fills me with a sense of accomplishment, more importantly I cannot help but feel grateful for the opportunity and the honor of being associated with the journal at a time of its tremendous growth and success.

In the last 5 to 10 years, Diabetes Care has continuously grown in terms of the submission numbers (over 11,500 new articles in 4 years!), impact factor, and readership. It is well established as the leading diabetes clinical journal worldwide and is now published in several languages. Our Web site continues to be very popular as judged by the large number of daily “hits.” We continue to take pride in the fact that the journal, along with the American Diabetes Association, remains the major source of information about the disease internationally. Most importantly, I have learned a tremendous amount about diabetes from our authors and reviewers, as well as about the publishing process, which continues to evolve as new technologies become available.

I look forward to handing over the expectation that Diabetes Care will continue to innovate and achieve new success as the premier journal in diabetes to the incoming team. This comes at a time of considerable challenges with financial and other obstacles restricting progress in research to find a cure and improve the lives for people with diabetes. Despite these obstacles and diminished research funding, we continue to attract high quality research covering all clinical aspects of the disease from epidemiology to everyday clinical care. Our submission rate continues to grow, which brings a downside—the rise in our rejection rate—now over 80%.

To help us produce an outstanding journal we need your help, and I must once again make the appeal for reviewers, pointing out that it is the responsibility of all authors, and indeed all readers, of the journal. It is a privilege to serve as a reviewer, and by critiquing articles in a timely way you are sharing your experience with the Editorial Committee and authors to assure that the highest quality papers are published in a timely manner. We do have many outstanding reviewers and are very grateful to them for their dedication to the journal. However, only 1,294 out of 6,745 eligible reviewers agreed to review. Those that review frequently and qualify for the Star Rewards program are sent a small token of appreciation at the end of each year. I take this opportunity to thank all of our reviewers, but in particular Professor Harry Keen, one of our best, who has received a letter (and a Diabetes Care coffee mug!) 10 years in a row.

We continue to take pride in the rapid turnaround of our review and decision process, our average time to first decision being slightly over 18 days. We have also been able to minimize paper consumption by qualifying a significant amount of material as online-publication only. In addition, it will soon be possible to download this material when the main article is downloaded from the Web site, allowing readers to view the paper in its entirety. We have also invested in software to recognize and minimize plagiarism, which is fortunately rare but must be detected and dealt with.

We have made every effort to be more transparent in having authors and reviewers declare conflicts of interest, and we will continue to take steps to minimize these. On the other hand, we must not shut the door to collaborations with industry and other partners who persevere in their efforts to find a cure for diabetes–whether altruistic or for profit.

We continue to make progress in our technologies that make our information available in formats that are more acceptable to a greater variety of people. We have recently begun developing brief pod casts, which consists of a discussion between the editor and author summarizing the research and giving our audience a succinct insight into the thought process behind that particular article, as well as future research. These are available on our Web site and through Diabetes Digest.

These are challenging times in health care and chronic disease, and we have highlighted the issues facing us in delivering care with commentaries on health care reform and trends in delivering cost-effective care. We look forward to publishing papers that demonstrate innovations in technology and medications that will improve the lives of people with diabetes as we establish these new systems of care.

I would like to thank our outstanding team of associate editors and the Editorial Board, particularly those who are rotating off of the board: Dorothy Becker, Nichola Davis, Richard Grant, Margaret Gray, Silvio Inzucchi, Laurence Kennedy, Lawrence Perlmuter, Matthew Riddle, Sharon Saydah, Guillermo Umpierrez, and Rachel Wildman and welcome new Editorial Board members who have been outstanding reviewers over the last few years.

None of our success would have been possible without the hard work and organization in our editorial office, which for several years has remained in Indianapolis, and in particular Lyn Reynolds, Shannon Potts, Jane Lucas, Rita Summers, and Joan Garrett, as well as the publishing team in our Alexandria office. I look forward to continuing to work with them—even though it will not be as editor after 2011.

V.A.F. is supported by grants to Tulane University from GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis, Novo Nordisk, Takeda, AstraZeneca, Pfizer, sanofi-aventis, Eli Lilly, Daiichi Sankyo, Novartis, the National Institutes of Health, and ADA. He has received honoraria for consulting and lectures from GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis, Takeda, Novo Nordisk, sanofi-aventis, Eli Lilly, and Daiichi Sankyo. No other potential conflicts of interest relevant to this article were reported.

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