The history of scientific publishing is assumed to begin with the publication of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in March 1665 by Henry Oldenburg who was the publisher and the editor, but also the first secretary of the Royal Society (1). Since then, more than 55- million of articles have been published and currently every year 500.000 new articles are estimated to be produced by researchers. Pubmed has indexed more than 29-million articles as of December 2018. A recent bibliometric analysis indicated that global scientific output doubles every nine years (2). On a recent count, the number of active scholarly peer-reviewed journals approaches 30.000 excluding the number of predatory or fake scientific journals (3, 4). The academic pressure on the shoulders of scientists as popularly coined by the phrase ‘publish or perish’ is somewhat responsible for such a speedy increase in figures.

Then, keeping with all the above figures in mind, is another medical journal needed? Well, before giving a straight answer let me explain first what we intend to do with Infectious Diseases & Clinical Microbiology (IDCM): This is going to be an online-only, peer-reviewed Journal publishing articles in both clinical microbiology and infectious diseases. Our international editorial board aims to provide a fast peer-review process giving the first response for revision or disposition of the submitted articles within 4 weeks. After final acceptance of the material, we commit ourselves to release the paper within 4 weeks. Although the full Journal will be published three times yearly (i.e. April, August, and December), we will immediately upload the accepted manuscripts on journal website as a citable item which will be freely accessible to all readers. No publication fees will be charged to authors as the owner of the Journal (The Turkish Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases-KLIMIK) will assume all editorial and publishing expenses. We believe that this is a remarkable opportunity for publishing scientists in the wake of Plan S which has been recently launched by the European Research Council.  Our publication portfolio will have a wide spectrum including original research articles, invited review articles, case reports including visual and video case presentations, Please visit Instructions to Authors at our journal website. We aim to be included in major indexing systems as soon as possible and obtain an impact factor at the earliest opportunity. Of course, we are aware that these are very ambitious desires. However, considering our highly-motivated and qualified editorial board and strong support from the Society we are confident that these are achievable targets. Returning to my earlier question, the response we believe is that “despite so many scientific journals are currently available, there is still need for new channels for the quality data to be shared in the scientific environment”.

So, I invite you to join us in this exciting endeavor and submit your research to IDCM.

Murat Akova, MD
Editor-in-Chief