The Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy celebrates its 40th anniversary in 2015. I am delighted to be taking over the helm as Editor-in-Chief from Professor Alan Johnson. I am honoured to be the eighth Editor-in-Chief of what has become known affectionately as the ‘blue Journal’. Those of you who are old enough to remember the original Journal will have seen many changes in the last 40 years. In 1975 there were around 100 articles published. This has now risen to around 500 articles annually. The success of the Journal is reflected in the impact factor, which now exceeds 5. The Journal received almost 2000 papers for consideration last year, but we had to disappoint authors by rejecting more than three-quarters of submissions. For the first two decades typewritten articles were sent by post to the Editor-in-Chief who then selected reviewers who received their copy also by post accompanied by a sheet of editorial symbols. The review was then conducted with a pen or pencil. The reviewer then typed out his or her review and returned it by post to the Editor-in-Chief. Revisions were also done using typewriters, brown envelopes and the Postal Service. The introduction of the Internet changed all that and we now have ScholarOne™ Manuscripts as a portal for all communications between authors, editors and reviewers. This has helped reduce the time from submission to publication by nearly two-thirds over the last 15 years. We can now boast a median time from acceptance to online publication of just over 4 weeks.
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J. Peter Donnelly (2014) studied this question.