Dear Colleagues,

This Editorial is Special in many senses. As you might have already noticed there have been important changes to the Editorial Board. Our founding Editor-in-Chief Professor Robert Montés-Micó resigned from the position in July due to increasing institutional and international responsibilities.

Consequently, the Journal Executive Board has offered me that position, and in spite of the great responsibility that this implies, I have accepted this challenge. I will do my utmost best to serve the Journal and honour the job developed by our former Editor-in-Chief over the past 3 years since J Optom was first published in September 2008. We also welcome to the lead of the Editorial Team, David Piñero, now in the role of Associate Editor-in-Chief. David Piñero is one of the most active optometrists producing and publishing research results, and without a doubt, he will be of great help in continuing to develop the Journal at international level.

At the same time, the Journal of Optometry now welcomes a new format for quick publication of state-of-the-art research communications in the form of Scientific Reports. This modality incorporates the former Technical Reports as well as short versions of Original Articles when quick publication might be critical to communicate relevant results to the large audience of Journal of Optometry, one of the leading Open-Access journals in the field.

Other changes are also to be highlighted is the new webpage that is now available at www.journalofoptometry.org where you can find all the issues already published to date, along with Instructions to Authors and the corresponding Submission and Tracking System.

Indexing in internationally recognised database continues to be one of the major goals of the Journal of Optometry. As such, the Journal is also to be congratulated for its incorporation in SCImago (www.scimagojr.com) database where the Journal is ranked as «Q1» category within the Optometry section. Also to be highlighted is the full coverage of the Journal's contents by ScienceDirect (www.sciencedirect.com). Although this is a paid database, it is one of the leading databases used by researchers in different fields; readers can always download our complete published contents free of charge from the Journal's webpage.

During the past (and first) three years of life, the Journal of Optometry has been set up, and in a very short period of time it has achieved significant world-wide recognition as mentioned in recently published Editorials. All of this would have been very difficult, not to say impossible, without our former Editor-in-Chief.

Robert, we are all grateful for your vision, dedication, hard work and guidance to the whole Editorial and Executive team. Thank you and good luck in your future endeavours!