Seasons greetings and changes for the upcoming year

We would like to wish all our friends, colleagues, readers and their families a very happy holiday season. We have had a number of exciting things happen to the Society and Journal this year. First, we have had a significant jump in our impact factor, thanks to your contributions to the Journal. We also had more articles evaluated this year than ever before. The new International Pediatric Nephrology Association (IPNA) web site is now open and has all the teaching articles available to you. You can find it at http:// www.ipna-online.org/. The web site also has all the selfassessment questions available, in an interactive form for you to test your skills and receive immediate feedback. We would like to bring you up to date with a few changes that will be occurring in the Journal. In order to keep the Journal functioning at a high level, there have to be new personnel to bring in fresh ideas. This is true of the editorial board, Associate Editors and the Editors-in-Chief. We have been honored to have had Professors Robert H. Mak, Willem Proesmans and Howard Trachtman as our first group of teaching editors. They have taken a vague concept and brought it to reality. Under their leadership, there have been 70 articles published, either in print or online, by the Journal. The topics covered thus far include focal and segmental glomerulosclerosis, chronic kidney disease, vesicoureteral reflux, long-term dialysis, acute kidney failure, neurogenic bladder and transplantation. Each of these teaching articles is aimed at keeping pediatric nephrologists up to date on important issues in our field, as well as teaching trainees about these clinically relevant topics. The teaching articles have helped fulfill the educational mission of the Journal and the International Pediatric Nephrology Association. For these achievements, we are extremely grateful. We would be remiss in not thanking the many authors of the teaching articles that have been submitted and the many reviewers who also gave their time to evaluate and improve those submissions. The new teaching editors will be Drs. Frederick Kaskel and Lesley Rees. Robert Mak will stay on for an additional year, so that there will be continuity. They will have large shoes to fill. They will be charged with maintaining a continuous flow of new teaching articles for our readers. They have already started work on soliciting future reviews and will be evaluating the submissions soon. We would be delighted to have suggestions for future topics and authors from our readers, as you have your fingers on the pulse of our field. There will be one change that will need to be made in the future. We had hoped to publish all the manuscripts in a group of topics together. However, if one article had not yet been submitted, this delayed the publication in print, but not online, of the whole group. We apologize for any inconvenience this might have caused the authors. To prevent this from happening in the future, we will no longer delay publications to keep all the topics together. The first accepted will be the first published. The topics that will be covered in 2010 will include genetic disorders of the kidney, urolithiasis and nephrolithiasis, and hypertension. Last, but certainly not least, we would like to thank Franz Schaefer, Burkhard Tonshoff and Uri Alon, who have served as Associate Editors and have helped us make M. Baum (*) Division of Pediatric Nephrology, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, 5323 Harry Hines Boulevard, Dallas, TX 75390-9063, USA e-mail: Michel.Baum@UTSouthwestern.edu