Report From the Editorial Office

Norbert Lameire, Jürgen Floege and David C. Wheeler

Renal Division, University Hospital Ghent, De Pintelaan 185 9000 GENT, Belgium

Correspondence and offprint requests to: Norbert Lameire, Renal Division, University Hospital Ghent, De Pintelaan 185 9000 GENT, Belgium. Email: norbert.lameire{at}ugent.be

This October issue of NDT is the first to be compiled by the new senior editorial team led by Norbert Lameire.

We hope to build on the earlier achievements of Alex Davison, the founding father of the Journal, Eberhard Ritz and, more recently, Tilman Drüeke. We acknowledge the enormous contribution that Tilman has made to the Journal during his 6 year tenure as Editor-in-chief.

As pointed out in the last Editorial Report [1], the readership of NDT has expanded steadily over the last few years, as shown by increasing subscription rates. Another marker of success is the progressive rise in ‘hit’ rates that have been documented over the time that the Journal has been accessible on the Internet (via HighWire Press). Furthermore, NDT has become the leading European journal in the field of nephrology in terms of ‘Impact Factor’. Tilman is to a large extent to be credited and congratulated for these recent achievements, which have made the task of the new editorial team easier in one sense, but even more challenging in another.

NDT is and will remain a primarily clinical journal that aims to provide up-to-date information for the clinical nephrologist that will help in daily practice. It is perhaps no surprise that two other leading publications in nephrology, JASN and Kidney International, have recently decided to introduce more clinically oriented journals to accompany their existing publications. This highlights the growing need for the clinician to stay informed of the latest developments that may influence practice. NDT will, of course, continue to publish high-quality clinical research, but at the same time will aim to integrate this with the latest developments in basic sciences. Submissions of a more basic nature are therefore strongly encouraged and we hope that the Journal will continue to provide a platform for the widespread dissemination of first-rate laboratory science. We realize that it is virtually impossible for a busy clinician to read highly specialized literature in any great detail and that the Journal should help to provide this material in a more readily digestible format.

This is precisely the reason that the Council of the ERA-EDTA agreed that, besides the new editor-in-chief, two deputy editors, rather than one, should be appointed.

Jürgen Floege (University of Aachen, Germany) besides his regular editorial tasks, will concentrate on the supervision of a new initiative that has been launched in this issue to give our readers insight into the new and more basic developments in fields related to nephrology, such as molecular biology, genetics and biochemistry, to name but a few. We have called this new section ‘Translational Nephrology’ because it should help the clinicians to understand new developments in basic research that will hopefully one day help them in their clinical practice.

David Wheeler (University College London, UK) will be helping the editor-in-chief to select the best quality clinical papers for publication in the Journal. He will also be responsible for editing the supplements.

We are also fortunate that Eberhard Ritz has agreed to continue in his role of supervising the editorial comments, one of the most successful sections in the Journal. His enormous experience and wide range of contacts within nephrology remain real assets for the Journal.

In view of the important links that nephrology has with other fields of medicine including transplantation, we hope to develop closer scientific cooperation with journals prominent in these fields. We will look for associate editors, who are experts in these various fields, to regularly summarize important advances that may be relevant for nephrologists, but published in non-nephrological specialized journals, which are not always directly accessible to the clinical nephrologist. We propose that such cooperation may be reciprocal and might lead other specialists to pay greater attention to the renal aspects of the systemic diseases they encounter.

A closer cooperation with NDT Educational will also be developed. This highly successful electronic web-based journal remains under the capable and stimulating editorship of Carmine Zoccali. Many of the very informative case reports that cannot be published in the paper version of the Journal due to space and cost constraints can be submitted and eventually published on the Web via ‘NDT Educational’. In a step towards making the printed version of NDT more useful for teachers and lecturers, the figures published in original articles can now be directly downloaded and incorporated into Microsoft Power Point presentations.

Other planned initiatives will no doubt increase the attractiveness of the Journal to its readers. We believe that the Journal is now so well-established in its abbreviated form that the full wording of the title is unnecessary and from January 2006 onwards, in agreement with the ERA-EDTA council, the name can be changed to simply NDT. In consultation with our publisher, Oxford University Press, we are also planning a more attractive cover which will list headlines from the issue rather than details of the contents.

An important issue for editors, as well as for authors and reviewers, is that of conflicts of interests. In order to avoid, or at least minimize these problems, the Editor-in-chief of NDT has recently joined the World Association of Medical Editors (WAME) (www.wame.org). According to this voluntary association, conflicts of interest may influence the judgement of authors, reviewers, and editors, and are often not immediately apparent to others. Such conflicts may be personal, commercial, political, academic, or financial. Financial interests may include employment, research funding, stock or share ownership, patents, payment for lectures and consultancies. The perception of a conflict of interest is nearly as important as an actual conflict itself, since both may erode trust. WAME recommends that all such interests (or absence thereof) must be declared in writing by authors upon submission of the manuscript and if any are declared, they should be published with the article. As well-known to our readers and authors, this policy has been followed by NDT for many years. In the future, reviewers working on behalf of the Journal will also be asked to routinely declare any competing interests that could affect their judgements. These will include non-financial competing interests such as the submission of a similar manuscript for review in the same or another journal, a similar research project nearing completion, or a close collaboration (or competition) with one of the authors of the manuscript. Having assessed any such conflicts of interest with respect to a particular manuscript, the editor will be better able to determine whether it is appropriate to involve a particular reviewer. As far as we can judge, most, if not all reviewers of NDT already follow this policy and review in a highly ethical manner.

Perhaps of greater importance are the potential conflicts of interest that relate to editors, and members of the editorial board. According to the recommendations of WAME, a summary of the financial and non-financial support that editors receive will be published annually in the Journal. Editors assigned a manuscript in which they may have a conflict of interest will be asked to abstain from reviewing and the manuscript will be passed on to another editor with no conflict. The policies that govern the management of such potential conflicts will be available to readers in the printed Journal or on the Web.

In following the WAME directive, we hope that the transparency and trust that our readers have in the Journal will be enhanced and that we will encourage even more authors and reviewers to work with us.

Finally, our sincere gratitude goes out to all members of the Editorial Board, the composition of which remains essentially unchanged at the present time, as well as to our Subject and Section Editors, who will be of tremendous help in advising us as we become accustomed to our new roles. We would also like to thank the ERA-EDTA council for their trust and for the material support they have given us so far and to our administrative staff for their continued help.

We also greatly appreciate the extreme professionalism of our publisher, Oxford University Press, who continuously strives to improve the Journal.

The readers are our final judges and we hope that over the coming years we will appeal to their needs and that with the support of our authors and editors, NDT will continue to grow as one of the most highly respected journals in nephrology.

Conflict of interest statement. None declared.



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  1. Drueke TB, Lameire N. Report from the Editorial Office. Nephrol Dial Transplant 2005; 20: 1–5[Free Full Text]




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