Report from the editorial office

First of all, we wish all our readers, reviewers, editorial board members and collaborators a very happy new year and all the best for 2007. We hope that the coming year will prove to be successful for every one of you. This editorial briefly describes some important changes we plan to make to NDT. At a ‘brainstorming’ meeting in November that was attended by many of our editors, our publisher Oxford University Press (OUP) and the council of the EDTA/ERA, current and future issues affecting medical journals in general and NDT in particular were discussed. The most important of these are the growing number of submissions, the impact factor of the journal, and the position of NDT and OUP concerning open access. It is gratifying to see that the number of submissions to NDT continues to increase ( Table 1 ) and that manuscripts are being submitted from all over the globe, hopefully reflecting the growing international popularity of the Journal. However, this increase causes a number of problems. Despite the fact that papers are published on the journal's website within 3–4 weeks of acceptance, there is a growing backlog of manuscripts and the size of the printed volume is increasing. Of course, the easy solution to this problem would be to reduce the overall acceptance rate, which is currently around 35%, and this we plan to do.