TheEuropean Respiratory Journalmakes COPD a priority: Table 1–

hronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) represents a major problem for public health worldwide and its burden is expected to increase in the next decade.Despite the extensive resources invested in research and the wealth of studies published in leading scientific journals, there are still many unknown aspects regarding the nature of COPD, which make this disease difficult to treat.A number of authors and societies have recently outlined some of the burning questions on COPD that need to be addressed by researchers in order to reduce the burden of the disease and help funding agencies to prioritise limited resources in competitive calls.They include documents from the American Thoracic Society (ATS)/European Respiratory Society (ERS) [1, 2], the Global Alliance against Chronic Respiratory Diseases (GARD) [3], the International Primary Care Research Group [4] and the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine [5, 6].The number of indexed respiratory journals has substantially increased in the past few years and some also incorporate COPD in their title, which allows more room for articles on this disease.The European Respiratory Journal (ERJ) has already published many papers on COPD and is eager to publish more, and better, research on this topic in the near future.However, we must keep in mind that space is limited and the competition for priority is tough among manuscripts in different fields.The ERJ can currently accept less than 15% of submitted manuscripts, and immediate rejection without external peer review is becoming a painful but necessary measure given the overload of manuscripts not focused on sufficiently relevant questions.We understand that, after the time-consuming task of formatting text, tables and figures, collecting signed forms, and then uploading it all in a web server, no one enjoys a same-day response of ''No thanks''.