Giriş
With this Editorial, my mission on the Editorial Board of the Mediterranean Journal of Infection Microbes and Antimicrobials (MJIMA, www.mjima.org) where I served a little more than four years as Editor-in-Chief and four years as Associate Editor ended. One of the important things I personally wanted to do during my scientific career was to be the Editor-in-Chief of a scientific journal and to manage the progress of the journal as Editor-in-Chief. As someone who loves football very much, I may describe this as analogous to the process of contributing to the successful promotion of a football team to the top leagues.
MJIMA was founded during Prof. Dr. Vahaboglu’s term in the Infectious Diseases and Clinical Microbiology Speciality Society of Turkey (EKMUD) and I was a an Executive Board member at that time. After working as the assistant editor of our founding editor Prof. Dr. Dilek Arman for four years and working in the kitchen of scientific publishing, I was appointed as Editor-in-Chief by the Editoral Board of EKMUD during Prof. Dr. İftihar Köksal term at the end of 2015.
According to the instructions that we had that we formed and that I had also contributed to its formation while establishing the journal (we were based on the absence of an everlasting editorial system and on the intermittent motion), the current period of four years was over. During these four years, I had the opportunity to contribute to the progress of the journal as I wished. As the Editorial Board, we contributed to the creation of a well-functioning system. With the contribution of Galenos Publishing House, we have created a high quality system that can work well, but sometimes not as fast as we would like. During this time, MJIMA has made quite positive progress and it has started to be indexed by Web of Science-Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI), Scopus, Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), Proquest, EBSCO, Embase, CABI, CINAHL Complete, Gale / Cengage Learning, Index Copernicus, Root Indexing, British Library TurkMedline, J-GATE, EuroPub, Hinari, OARE, ARDI, AGORA and GOALI.
As the journal progressed through this four-year process; I, everyone who read this article, my Associate Editor friends, their families, my children Doğa ve Nehir Sipahi and my wife Hilal Sipahi aged four years. Since time was not endless, the times I spent for the journal took some from lives or the educational processes of my dear students and valuable trainees for whom I was responsible for. In this context, I would like to thank them for their support over the four-year period.
Those who are familiar with me know the importance of football and especially Göztepe Sports Club (SC) in my life. I would like to thank Göztepe SC Chairman Mehmet Sepil and all the coaches, players, and fans who contributed. Göztepe SC, one of the most important variables of my soul and therefore of my body, promoted to Turkish Super Lig from the 2nd league B category in this process. The team is in the Super Lig for three consecutive football seasons for the first time since 1976. An important reason for mentioning this specifically is that this process has also contributed significantly to MJIMA.
In my last Editorial, I would like to share what I did as the Editor-in-Chief, what we did as the Editorial Board and Galenos Publishing House, and the processes and pathways we applied in order to ensure permanence:
* Conversion of article management system to Scholarone system
* Plagiarism control followed by the decision of whether the manuscripts submitted to the journal will go to the peer review or not is made by the Editorial Board’s internal organization (although sometimes the decision to send the article to peer review can be made personally by the Editor-in-Chief, the refusal decision is taken by the Editorial Board without sending the manuscript to peer review).
* Directing the articles to be sent to the referee by the relevant Associate Editor (according to the current Associate Editor, total number of article evaluations and topics of interest)
* Ensuring that all review typed manuscripts submitted to the journal and decided to be sent to the referee are evaluated by at least five different referees, and all other manuscripts by at least three different referees
* Ensuring that the peer review process is not affected by the names of the authors of the article
* For manuscripts of which process of sending to the referee prolonges - if necessary – poking the Associate Editor or intervening by assigning a referee personally, and - if necessary - the management of the process of poking the referees if the refereeing duration is overdue but the refereeing is not completed.
* If necessary-poking the Associate Editor for the manuscript that go to peer review and come to the decision stage
* Getting poked by Associate Editors and Hatice Balta-Sever when necessary
* Managing the editorial and peer review processes of the reviews submitted to the journal personally as Editor-in-Chief (except for the articles I am among the authors)
* Evaluating all but especially accepted manuscripts directly or indirectly as Editor-in-Chief with the eyes of a referee.
* If the Associate Editor is late in the process of assigning the incoming revisions to the referees, the assignment is made and the invitation is accepted on behalf of the referees who want to rereview the manuscript.
* Reviewing keywords of all accepted manuscripts * Personally participating in meetings related to scientific publishing held by ULAKBIM (Turkish Academic Network and Information Center) and lobbying activities for the journal
* Deciding on the subject of invited reviews for the journal, requesting from the relevant academicians, organization of review requests and poking when necessary
* Organization of the annual MJIMA session at EKMUD annual congresses, organization of the annual meeting with Galenos Publishing House during the congress
* Ensuring that the best research article MJIMA selects annually is scored and determined by the Editorial Board (Editors)
* Management of the proofreading phase of all accepted manuscripts in English and Turkish (if available); the proofreading process is carried out by the corresponding author of the manuscript, as well as two Associate Editors and the Editor-in-Chief. The Editor-in-Chief selects the Associate Editors who will make proofreading by considering the number of proofreading pages that the Associate Editors have done until then. I would like to emphasize here that this process is the most time-consuming part of the workload of the Editorial Board and our publisher Galenos Publishing House. Thousands of corrections have been performed during the nearly 1100 pages of proofreading, which took place over four years.
* In addition to tracking references to the journal and putting them on the website, calculation of unofficial impact factors and managing the process of putting them on the website
* Organization and follow-up of informing mailings related to the journal
* Periodically revising the Editorial Board and the Editorial Advisory Board, keeping the number of members out of Turkey within international criteria
* Annually, keeping the rates of referees out of Turkey within international criteria
* Following up the journal’s indexing admissions in international databases and performing necessary modifications or revisions when needed
* Planning, establishing and following up organizations/initiatives that will provide extra value for the journal
* Writing annual editorials and organization of thank you letters for reviewers
* Management of the process of evaluating the articles containing statistical analysis by the Statistical Editor/referee (All articles containing statistical analysis were evaluated by at least one statistical referee, most of them by Hilal Sipahi, some by Hür Hassoy)
* Checking the MJIMA website periodically and making the necessary modifications
* Reviewing and confirming the EKMUD payments for MJIMA
* Periodic reviewing and improving of “Instructions to Authors” (revised three times in four years)
* Management of the peer review process of the abstracts during the EKMUD annual congress period (sending the abstracts to at least two referees, sending them to the third referee in case of two conflicting decisions), creating the abstract book and managing the proofreading processes. In the proofreading phase of the congress books, I would also like to thank the EKMUD Editorial Boards.
* Confronting all the criticisms against the journal’s strict system, which I have tried to summarize above.
Life passes quickly and everything that starts ends. As the four years are ending, there are many people I would like to thank personally. On behalf of MJIMA, I am grateful to all the Editorial Board (Ediz Tütüncü, Sedat Kaygusuz, Yaşar Bayındır, Özlem Kandemir, Selçuk Kaya, İlker Uçkay, Tristan Ferry, Pasquale Pagliano) and all colleagues who peer reviewed for the journal (You can also see the peer reviewers who served for MJIMA throughout 2019) for doing this extraordinary labor-intensive work amateurish and in high-quality. Thanks to my dear trainees Uğur Önal (he became a specialist) and Deniz Akyol who helped me cope with so many articles as Editor-in-Chief, and Ayşe Uyan-Önal who shared the three multicenter studies containing important data for Turkey that we organized, with the journal. I would also like to thank all the authors who submitted articles to the journal, Hilal Sipahi who gave great support to the journal as statistics editor, and all EKMUD Editorial Boards. I would like to thank Galenos Publishing House workers, Hatice Balta-Sever and Burak Sever for their patience, effort and support. They have made all the necessary steps for MJIMA to reach you in the last four years.
As grand master Çetin Altan said, “Humanity does not regress”. In this context, while saying farewell to you, I wish MJIMA infinite success in the future under the management of Editor-in-Chief Prof. Dr. Ediz Tütüncü and the new Editorial Board.
Prof. Dr. Oğuz Reşat SİPAHİ
