His successor is Professor Dirk van Veldhuisen from the Department of Cardiology at the University Medical Center Groningen, in the Netherlands. Professor van Veldhuisen brings with him two Groningen colleagues as new deputy editors, Professor Wiek van Gilst, a clinical pharmacologist who is Head of the Department of Experimental Cardiology, and Dr Adriaan Voors, a clinical cardiologist involved in a large number of heart failure trials, including the European heart failure project, BIOSTAT-CHF.
Under Professor Swedberg's editorship - and in the wake of ever increasing submissions - the EJHF has progressed from bimonthly to monthly publication, and its impact factor has risen to 3.4 (based on citations for 2006-2007). Around 650 manuscripts are now submitted each year, with lead time from acceptance to online publication as little as three weeks. "We are proud of this achievement," reports Professor Swedberg.
Professor van Veldhuisen aims to continue this remarkable growth and improvement, and to make the EJHF "the most prominent heart failure journal", and "the world forum for good - clinical and basic - heart failure research". Competition, of course, lurks across the Atlantic, but strengths in Europe lie with the ESC's family of journals, notably the European Heart Journal, and the manuscript transfer system which operates among them. "Many good papers that for some reason just do not make it into the European Heart Journal still represent very good studies, and can get reviewed and published very quickly via this new system," says Professor van Veldhuisen.
Professor Swedberg, who describes his five years editing the journal as "interesting and valuable", will remain a consulting editor to the EJHF, and the editorial office will remain in Hull, UK. Expectations are, therefore, that the transition from one editor to the next will be seamless and that the journal will continue its rapidly increasing growth.
* The EJHF is published on behalf of the Heart Failure Association of the European Society of Cardiology. The first issue appeared in January 1999 under the editorship of Professor John Cleland.
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