Submissions to Brain continue to increase in number. The increase has been particularly striking in the last year, up by about 25% compared to the previous year. Although an increasing trend has been evident for the last 10 years, and has no doubt been experienced by other journals, I attribute much of the recent very sharp increase to the online submission facility that has been available to authors since July 2001. Initial difficulties with the new system, referred to in my editorial message last year, have been largely overcome and informal feedback from authors has, with few exceptions, been very positive. When authors experience a problem, help is available either through Lubna Zafar in our Editorial Office, or through the providers of the online facility, ScholarOne. ScholarOne have recently put in place a telephone helpline that operates during European working hours, to complement that already available to those in North America. From July 2001 to July 2002 the Editorial Office ran a parallel system for online and hard copy submissions, which certainly made our task more difficult. But since August 2002, with the cooperation of our authors that we gratefully acknowledge, all submissions are now handled online, including of course the reviewing process and notification of decisions taken.

    One outcome of the online system has been a further shortening of the median time to the first decision, from 46 days in 2001 to 38 days to date in 2002, which has been achieved despite the 25% increase in submission rate. A less desirable consequence of the increase in submission rate has been the decline in the acceptance rate, now less than 25%. However, this is unavoidable because the size of the journal cannot be further increased.

    The scope of the journal has traditionally been wide, encompassing not only the whole of clinical neurology but also psychological disorders such as autism that lie at the borderline of our discipline but which are appropriate for inclusion in a ‘Journal of Neurology’, as Brain has always described itself. But in addition, the journal has published many high quality studies on ‘healthy subjects’; indeed, in 1998 these constituted over 30% of published papers. Faced with the ever-increasing number of papers submitted, we have had to substantially reduce the number of such papers that we publish, requiring that they ‘have a neurological orientation and are clearly relevant to the understanding of human disease’, as we set out in our Instructions to Authors.

    Papers submitted to the journal continue to have a wide geographical spread. 70% of papers now come from Europe, 17% from North America, and 13% from the Rest of the World of which Japan is the largest contributor. Our international commitment is evident from the composition of our Editorial Board, and from the fact that our referees are drawn from the neuroscience community worldwide.

    Our impact factor for 2001 (the last year for which it is available) was 7.4, slightly higher than for the previous year and the highest value so far achieved by the journal.

    Finally, it is a pleasure for me to thank Professor John Rothwell (Deputy Editor), members of the Editorial Board, our often over-worked referees (whom we listed in last month’s issue), and especially Carol Lovelidge and Lubna Zafar in the Editorial Office for coping so efficiently with the particularly heavy work load they have had to face over the last year.