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EDITORIAL

Reflections on passing the baton Sally M. Marshall 1

# Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020

My term of office as Editor-in-Chief of Diabetologia comes to an end on 31 December 2020. It has been an eventful 5 years, mostly hugely enjoyable, challenging, rewarding and informative, but occasionally frustrating and annoying! Despite speculation that journals would rapidly become extinct, Diabetologia has survived and evolved and grown.

Out of sight, out of mind? On taking up my post, I quickly realised that the impact factor, which had been relatively stable, was starting to slip, and the number of submissions had begun to decline. The beginning of the drop seemed to coincide with the decision taken by the EASD, for financial reasons, to distribute Diabetologia to members electronically rather than in paper format. It seemed highly unlikely in this electronic era that the lack of a print journal would have such a dramatic effect, but no other form of publicity had been substituted. We therefore took simple steps to raise the visibility of the journal. Independently of our publishers, Springer Nature, we designed and brought online a new website (https://diabetologia-journal.org/), which I hope you find attractive, informative and easy to navigate. We developed a brief animation to highlight the mission statement of the journal and to introduce our editorial processes (www.youtube.com/watch?v=IR9rS2njW-U). EASD members now receive a weekly electronic table of contents (eTOC) of new online material by email, and EASD members and subscribers to the Springer Nature feed also receive a monthly email describing the complete contents of each issue of Diabetologia. All papers now include a Research in Context box, which should highlight the novelty of the work, and a graphical abstract, which summarises the study in a visual nutshell. We have increased our activity on * Sally M. Marshall [email protected] 1

Translational and Clinical Research Institute, Faculty of Clinical Medical Sciences, Newcastle University, Framlington Place, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

Twitter (@DiabetologiaJnl), trying to target specific audiences with appropriate information, and now have over 8000 followers. My thanks to all of you who retweet our posts. We arrange a small number of press releases to publicise our publications to the wider general community, and we work with authors’ institutional press offices to highlight individual papers. The introduction of special issues, exploring many aspects of one diabetes-related topic in depth, and linked to the Diabetologia symposium at the EASD annual scientific meeting, has been well received (see ‘Collections’ on the Diabetologia homepage). There is also now a Diabetologia booth at the EASD annual scientific meeting, staffed by members of the Editorial Office.

Measuring impact In response to these steps to increase visibility, it has been gratifying to see the number of submissions to Diabetologia climb back to the previous high levels. We are on course t