Editorial

Dear readers,

Acta chirurgiae plasticae, the journal of the Czech Society of Plastic Surgery, which you hold in your hand, or which you are reading on the Internet, has existed without interruption since 1959. Since the beginning, our leading specialists in the field of plastic surgery, such as prof. Burian or prof. Karfík, were those who contributed with their articles to our journal. During its existence the journal has become a traditional and important platform for scientific presentations in the field of plastic surgery in the Czech or Czechoslovak region as well as within the European level. The journal has always strived for the presentation of current state of the art knowledge in the field of plastic surgery as well as in other surgical disciplines, especially burns medicine, oral and maxillofacial surgery, aesthetic surgery and hand surgery.

The journal experienced its good and worse years. During the last decade, the situation and the conditions, in which the journal existed, had significantly changed, more strongly than in all previous decades together. The number of specialized journals with a similar content continues to grow and the competition in the “fight” for readers as well as authors is much harder. Other important factors, that play currently a major role and make it difficult to keep the journal on the market among the other journals, is especially the wide availability of medical resources on the Internet, the “open access” purely Internet titles, providing full text articles in the moment of their acceptance for publication, and understandable effort of professional public and educational institutions to publish articles mainly in journals with impact factor. Of course we cannot ignore also the economic and organizational demands associated with the management of the journal. All these factors put the journal in front of the major challenges such as the conditions under which it is possible to manage the journal and which direction should be chosen for the journal in the future.

In 2015 the team of people who have the future of the journal in their hands significantly changed. A new editor-in-chief and his deputy were appointed and the Editorial Board was also modified. New editorial team wants to keep the journal in printed form, but also to try to increase the “attractiveness” of the journal by other means, e.g. expansion of focus of the journal, publication of medical educative articles and news. We want to achieve formal standards common in the contemporary scientific literature and we plan to establish a possibility of online article submission and online administration of the review process. We are also considering enabling free online access to full texts of published articles and the editorial team constantly wants to obtain impact factor in the future.

The main effort of current editors and editorial board is to stabilize the journal for a longer period of time and adapt its image into new, dynamically changing times, while preserving the best of its history and continue this history with dignity. Today we are proud of the history of the journal and we also want to be proud of the history of the journal in the future, at the moment when we will be passing on the journal to our successors. We hope that with your submitted papers it certainly will go much easier. So please do not be afraid to send us your articles. We always strive to do our best to help you to solve all the problems and questions during the review process.

Keep your fingers crossed!

Aleš Fibír, M.D., PhD.

Editor-in-chief

Acta chirurgiae plasticae