EDITORIAL
A medium of science communication in our times

Science communication is of paramount importance for academic medical community, and its integrity should be viewed as a driving force of the progress in biomedicine. We live in times of ground breaking discoveries, opening new horizons and launching new fields of science at a rapidly increasing pace. Recent advances in basic biomedical science have led to revising theories of atherosclerosis, oncogenesis and aging, and better understanding of basics of genetic, metabolic and inflammatory changes in human organism. Clinical science has seen great transformation, division into multiple ‘narrow’ subspecialties, and, yet again, tendency towards integration and formation of new promising specialties such as vascular haematology, vascular rheumatology, immunoinfectology etc. As a result, hundreds and thousands of new journals have emerged, aiming to provide a forum for communication among scientists with diverse professional background, between young specialists and distinguished experts, between scientists bearing knowledge of ‘old’ theories, practical approaches and those who gained skills in modern sophisticated therapeutic and diagnostic technologies. Fast processing of submissions, timely and expanded circulation of publications have become prerequisites of viability for most biomedical journals, and some have been also fortunate in launching online publication and open access format, which, undoubtedly, promoted world-wide circulation of publications, their visibility and, to some extent, quality. The peer-review process and unbiased editorial management have emerged as factors further increasing quality and integrity of publications, which, after all, not a sole (main) responsibility of author (s). Rapid growth of quantity of journals has raised the issue of not just quality of publications, but rather their ‘utility’, which promoted the use of a journal Impact Factor (IF; real, unofficial and published). Although some may argue objectivity of IF and may suggest other similar or ‘advanced’ tools, in our times, IF allows to distinguish top rank oldest journals such as The New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, Science from bottom level journals, which sooner or later will either disappear or, having an example of top rank journals, grow closer to them.
Over the past decade, it has become obvious that survival of biomedical and especially national or regional journals is subjected to its...


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