2012 was a busy and eventful year for the JLO as we sought to develop the educational value of the Journal on a number of fronts. A major development was the beginning of what we hope will be a fruitful collaboration with The Australian Society of Otolaryngology Head and Neck Surgery (ASOHNS). Articles selected by Simon Carney on behalf of ASOHNS are published in a twice-yearly supplement to the JLO.
We continue to regard the archive of the JLO as an invaluable resource and have used archive material in a number of initiatives. One of these was the production of a ‘virtual issue’ on the topic of ‘Global Health in ENT’. This involved the grouping together of newly commissioned articlesReference Fagan 1 – Reference D'Cruz, Sharma and Pai 4 with archive material. The archive was also used by Liam Flood and Guy Kenyon in their excellent historical review of the surgery of otosclerosis.Reference Flood and Kenyon 5
The development of the JLO website (www.jlo.co.uk) in parallel with the print journal continues. We see the website as a major part of our future and are exploring ways to produce a substantial web-based educational resource. In this regard, we have engaged the services of a new digital partner, Selesti. We thank our previous web provider, Tell Communications, for their work with the Journal over a number of years.
Our collaboration with the Otology and Laryngology and Rhinology Sections of the Royal Society of Medicine (RSM) continues with the successful JLO/RSM Visiting Professors project. In 2012, we welcomed Professors John House and K Hoermann, who delivered lectures in London, Birmingham and Dunkeld.
We have continued our ‘JLO Best Paper’ awards, in which we identify the most notable papers published in the Journal in the categories of review article, main article, basic science and short communication. In 2012, the winning authorsReference Heinze, Swanepoel and Hofmeyr 6 – Reference Broomfield, Bruce and Rothera 9 were invited to London to present their work at the RSM. We thank our Assistant Editors Desmond Nunez, Musheer Hussain, Liam Flood and Pat Bradley for their work in selecting the winners of these awards.
We are indebted to our Assistant Editors, who maintain our peer review process. We rely on a smaller number of reviewers than many journals and greatly appreciate their work on behalf of the journal. In 2012, we appointed Kate Evans, Claire Hopkins and Hisham Khalil to the Editorial Board. Quentin Gardiner and Vin Paleri were promoted to Senior Assistant Editors with additional responsibilities. We said goodbye to Linda Hunt who, as the Journal's statistical advisor, has provided expert advice over a number of years. We welcome Christopher Palmer, from the Centre for Applied Medical Statistics at The University of Cambridge, as Linda Hunt's successor.
We have renewed our publishing contract with Cambridge University Press and are grateful to Daniel Edwards, Susan Perkins, Charlotte Porter, Sarah Maddox, Adam St Leger-Honeybone and Katy Christomanou for their work with the Journal.
We remain indebted to the Journal's own staff, Rosamund Greensted, Patrick Broadhurst, Iona Copley, Lisa Colledge, Theresa Clarke and Louise Venables.
We wish you all a successful 2013 and thank you for your continued support for the Journal.
