A successful first year: taking stock and looking ahead

The biij will shortly be completing its first year of publication. This calls for a celebration for very many reasons. There have been mistakes made, lessons learned, triumphs and achievements…all in these 12 months. With this issue, we decided it was time to pause a little and take stock of our progress during the past year. We firmly believe that knowledge should not be the monopoly of a few select individuals especially when it has the potential to enhance the quality of life for mankind. We also believe that this can be achieved through participation in the open access initiative [1-3]. One of the founding principles of the biij is to ensure that biij offers easy access to research for academics, scientists and anybody else who seek it [1]. We are fully committed to the open access model of scholarly communication, which brings benefits to authors, readers, teachers, scholars, and researchers alike. It serves as a catalyst to the research world by ensuring that new developments and discoveries reach the farthest shores. To achieve this we have to acknowledge the support from researchers, reviewers, authors and readers who believed in our vision for the journal and helped realise it through their regular, invaluable contributions. We also acknowledge our sponsors who have been generous and enormously supportive. It takes a huge load off our shoulders when we know that each issue of the biij will see light of day thanks to their commitment. They say, the first year is always the most difficult to get through. The journal has been able to efficiently maintain the entire editorial lifecycle within a reasonable timeframe (data as of 29 June 2006): average time from submission to first review was 20.7 days, time lag between submission and acceptance (turn around time) was 109.9 days and a manuscript was published within a mean period of 35.2 days following acceptance. Each manuscript is processed for dual formats: a multimedia enabled, display independent web format, and a more traditional typeset PDF format. Abstracts are extracted and automatically indexed in supported bibliographic indexing engines. The number of submissions has reached 82 and our acceptance rate is currently 80.8%. The readership of biij comes from more than 60 countries, from Canada to Cyprus, from Singapore to Slovenia, and from United States to Uruguay; making it a truly international journal. Another achievement is that we have been indexed by the following …