Twenty years of editorship

EDITORIAL

Twenty years of editorship

Carlos E. A. Coimbra Jr.

Escola Nacional de Saúde Pública Sergio Arouca, Fundação Oswaldo Cruz, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil. [e-mail]

I begin this editorial with a confession: I was surprised when I realized that this year I would be completing twenty years as lead editor of Cadernos de Saúde Pública (CSP). The time for change has arrived. Although these two decades have certainly been a time of intense work, they were also a time when I learned a great deal about Public Health research in Brazil. Additionally, I enjoyed the enormous privilege of interacting with remarkable individuals from different institutions, as well as accompanying important developments in the field.

Along this journey, several key milestones in particular influenced me and will never be erased from my memory. For example, the various reformulations of the journal's editorial project, such as the layout of the cover and interior, typography, production, and distribution, were important in making the journal appealing to a wider readership. Also significant for me was indexing CSP in MEDLINE/PubMed and Web of Science during a time when the principal science indexes were reluctant to incorporate titles from the so-called developing world.

One development that marked my first decade leading CSP was the creation of the SciELO electronic library which, at the time, was in the vanguard of still incipient debates in Brazil about open access to scientific information. Yet, interest in the project was not limited to theory – SciELO effectively become the library of reference for Brazilian science journals and changed our culture regarding science editing. While writing this editorial, I visited the statistics section of SciELO and discovered that CSP continues to be the journal with the most accessed articles in the entire library, totaling 21,211,774 accesses since we joined the system in 1998. This represents an average of 1.5 million article accesses per year, a mind-boggling figure if we consider the pre-SciELO era, when the only available means for an interested reader to access our articles was through print copies.

The journal's increased visibility had direct implications for the number of articles published per volume. In 1985, the year CSP was founded, a total of 25 articles were published. During the journal's first decade, the average number of articles per volume increased to 40. Today, CSP is publishing about 250 articles per year, selected from approximately 1,400 new submissions annually. Such demand led the journal to adjust its periodicity from trimestral to monthly. With this change, CSP was consolidated as the Latin American Public Health journal with the largest yearly production of articles. Quality, originality, and innovation are the underlying principles that guide the editorial policy at CSP, ensured by a group of Associate Editors comprised of prolific and renowned researchers in their respective areas. As a result of this work by our team, encountered on the pages of CSP are influential articles that attest the important advances that occurred in the various fields of Public Health thinking and research during recent decades, in particular in Brazil.

As could not fail to be, CSP is a collective achievement, involving the collective effort of authors, reviewers, editors, readers, and the editorial staff that works tirelessly on all stages of production, from receiving new submissions to posting print copies. Indispensable was the support of the Office of the Director of the National School of Public Health and the funding agencies, especially CNPq and FAPERJ. For all this, I leave the editorship of CSP with a feeling of great satisfaction. I am certain that in the hands of the new editorial trio comprised of Marilia Sá Carvalho, Claudia Travassos, and Claudia Medina Coeli, CSP will continue perform its important mission of innovative and expert dissemination of scientific literature in public health.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  18 Oct 2012
• Date of issue
  Oct 2012