Dear Readers,

There is some news for IEM in 2013 as previously anticipated.

First of all, the number of issues per year will be 8 versus 6. This further testifies to the success and consolidation of our journal and the commitment of the Italian Society of Internal Medicine-SIMI, the owner of IEM. This will allow us to publish more papers, especially original articles and reviews, and to progressively shorten the time the accepted papers stay in an “online first” state. As explained in a recent “editor’s page,” there are many papers that were accepted between mid 2010 and early 2011 that largely exceeded the number of contributions we can publish in a reasonable span of time so that at present we have dozen of papers in an “online first” state for more than 1 year. We apologize to the authors.

The second main point for 2013 is that the printed journal will be sent to our subscribers only upon request and with a small charge. We believe that most readers prefer the online journal rather than the printed version. During the year 2013, we will explore whether IEM can become an online only journal.

Welcome to the new members of our Editorial Boards and a warm thank you to those who completed their term in 2012.

2013 will be the last year of my Editor-in-chief appointment by SIMI. It has been both an honour and a privilege for me as a scientist to accept this challenge.

I express my deep gratitude to the Editorial Board, to the Co-editor as well as to the other members, to the Advisory Board, to the Operative Group, and to Springer.

We hope you continue to enjoy and support our journal, and wish you a wonderful 2013.

Domenico Prisco

Editor-in-Chief

Internal and Emergency Medicine