New editor-in-chief of the European Heart Journal 2020

The first edition of the European Heart Journal appeared in January 1980, as a monthly scientific magazine with Desmond Julian as its first editor, followed by Henri Kulbertus from Liege, Belgium, Kim Fox, from London, UK and Frans Van De Werf from Leuven University, Belgium. In 2009, Thomas F. Lüscher, then from Zurich, now London, took over as the fifth editor of the European Heart Journal with the vision “The European Heart Journal Goes Global” [1]. With this strategy, numerous editors from around the world were invited to participate in the editorial process, in particular, from the US Bernard Gersch from the Mayo Clinic, and Marc Pfeffer, Scott Solomon and Christopher Cannon from Harvard University, Boston, as well as Hiroaki Shimokawa from Sendai, Japan, David Celermajer from Sydney, Australia and Runlin Gao from Beijing, China, to mention just a few. With this team, the editor-in-chief set new standards of scientific publishing and improved the quality of the published manuscripts [2]. Also, the content of the European Heart Journal was expanded with a news section, CardioPulse run by Dr Andros Tofield, and soon the journal was published weekly with reviews, original research, editorials, CardioVascular Flashlights and more recently a Discussion Forum for its readers. Furthermore, the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) journal family (fig. 1) was established, with transfer of manuscripts from the European Heart Journal to specialty journals. This allowed authors of papers considered by the editor-in-chief to be better suited to a specialty journal to transfer their manuscripts, with the existing reviews and without new formatting, to either Europace, the European Journal of Heart Failure or any other member of the ESC journal family. Over the years, the number of titles increased substantially, with new journals on acute cardiac care, pharmacotherapy, quality of care and, most recently, digital health. In addition, the appearance of the ESC journals underwent a significant change, with a new design reflecting corporate identity. The journal and its specialty sisters became available on iPhone and iPad, and views and downloads increased from 1 million to an estimated 12 million per year. The impact factor of the European Heart Journal and all the other members of the ESC journal family increased substantially (table 1). For the younger readers, a Twitter editor was hired and the editor-in-chief also regularly tweets about the content of each issue of the journal (the weekly IsFigure 1: The ESC journal family.