<i>Allergy</i>—Committed to progress in allergy and immunology
Authors: H.‐U. Simon, T. Bieber
Journal: Allergy (2018)

After more than 8 years, our terms as Co-Editors-in-Chief have now reached an end. We are thankful for having had the privilege to serve the community in this position. We think that we have reached our original goal of increasing the overall quality of the journal.1 The science which is reported every month in Allergy is of high quality and wide interest, largely contributing to the development of the fields of Allergy and Immunology. The impact of the journal is high, as reflected by its present impact factor of 7.36. The success of the journal is also a consequence of strong support provided by the European Academy of Allergy and Immunology (EAACI). EAACI members have published their best findings in Allergy which has been the key to further building up our reputation as one of the leading journals in the field. The leadership of EAACI supported the journal with multiple activities. For instance, interest groups have jointly worked together to generate position papers, reflecting the current understanding and defining still unmet needs in allergic and immunologic diseases. Such articles are of great impact with both the scientific community and our journal. An important issue for any scientific journal is how the Editors communicate with the authors. We have always taken the concerns of our authors seriously and have tried to serve them in the best possible way. This is partially reflected by the speed of our feedback to authors of submitted articles. The mean time between submission and the first decision letter has been about 15 days and has remained constant over the years. Clearly, some decisions were difficult and took longer, and we regret if we were unable to come to a conclusion within 4 weeks. It has been important to us that we provided helpful comments to authors whose papers did not reach the priority score required for publication in Allergy. It should be noted that more than 80% of the submitted papers have to be rejected, but we almost never receive negative feedback about the evaluation process. We like to think that in this respect, the Editorial work has been understood as fair. We have also been privileged to work with a highly motivated team of Associate Editors, all of them being successful scientists enjoying high reputations in their fields. Without their strong commitment, the helpful service to our authors would not have been possible. We are extremely thankful and wish to thank all Associate Editors for their hard work. We have been a stable team over a long period, at least partially owing to the friendly personal interactions and trust among us. Similarly, the collaboration between the scientific and production teams of the journal has been excellent. Without a high-quality production service, Allergy would not have the high reputation which it currently enjoys. We think that Allergy is now ready to do the next step forward. A new team of Editors together with the strong link to EAACI can certainly reach the goal of being the leading journal in the fields of Allergy and Clinical Immunology. We will be happy to continue supporting Allergy in this enterprise and wish the new Editorial team every success. We look forward to seeing Allergy grow, both in terms of scientific significance and impact. The authors declare no conflict of interest.