The Journal of Optometry – Peer-reviewed Journal of the Spanish General Council of Optometrists- was launched in March 2008 publishing the first issue by September 2008. It is now reaching 2.5 years of activity in spreading clinical and scientific knowledge in the field of Optometry and Visual Science and related areas. Despite this short path within the international scientific publication scenario, it is appropriate to stop and reflect about the challenges, achievements and the numbers that are making J Optom a reference in this competitive area.

In this editorial we will discuss the steps followed to setup the journal and the actual international impact in terms of audience from the readership and authorship point of view. In the second part of this editorial (2011;Vol.4:Issue 1), we will analyze the distribution of articles published in J Optom by type of article and country of origin as well as the citations made from other authors to papers published in the Journal of Optometry.

Table 1 summarizes the major milestones and achievements since the Journal has been launched. Since the public announcement and Call for Papers, several relevant aspects have to be highlighted. First, the great International Editorial Board made possible that “a new kid in town” became soon recognized as a “very serious player”. The automatic submission and tracking system was also a remarkable achievement to provide the highest operational levels of quality to authors, reviewers, editors and publishers. Full Open-access also warranted that thousands of visitors enjoyed readily access to the material published. More than 14,500 visits to the Journal during 2009 reflect the wide readership for the Journal.

This won’t be possible without the support of the Spanish General Council of Optometry. With no doubt the role of the Executive Board, leaded by its President has been crucial on this regard. As the submission, reviewing and publishing activity increased, became necessary to incorporate another important element in the role of Managing Editor.

To better understand what J Optom is and how much impact can get world-wide we have done some statistical evaluations about the countries represented in terms of visits to the webpage (Figure 1) and manuscript submissions (Figure 2). Further information on manuscript outcomes, acceptance and publication rates will be provided in the second part of this series.

Figure 1.

Distribution of visits to the Journal's webpage during 2009. Only the first top 30 countries are reported of the 123 different countries visiting the webpage reaching a total of 14,505 visits

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Source: Google Analytics and Journal of Optometry

Figure 2.

Distribution of manuscripts submitted for publication by country of origin of corresponding author (only top 20 are reported) during first 2 years from 15th March 2008 till 15th March 2010

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Source: Journal of Optometry

Figure 1 shows the visits to the webpage during 2009 (last whole year of activity). It is remarkable the wide range of countries that visit the journal's webpage www.journalofoptometry.org (now http://www.elsevier.es) with over 120 different countries being represented. Of remarkable interest was the progression in the time spent by visitors from 2008 to 2009 increasing by 2 fold the time spent reaching an average of 2.5 minutes per visit.

Currently, the publishing support of Elsevier and the hard work conducted by every element in the structure of the Journal, the hundreds of authors submitting their papers to J Optom, and the thousands of readers that already had made the Journal of Optometry part of their frequent sources of access to cutting-edge innovations in the field of Optometry and Vision Science, make us realize that the future is bright for the Journal of Optometry.

Beyond all these achievements, it is the recognition of the international community that makes all of us to be very enthusiastic and proud of the Journal. Perhaps the first global official recognition was the acceptance of J Optom to integrate the prestigious Scopus database during 2009, a year after the first issue had been delivered. With no doubt we will keep on working on the direction of further international indexing, and this is among the main priorities of the Journal now.

Figure 2 shows the distribution of countries that are represented in terms of manuscript submission. There are significant number of manuscripts from Spain which might be related with the increasing number of post-graduate research work conducted in MSc and PhD thesis and the subsequent increase in scientific activities within the field in this coutry1. When we look to the papers published, there is a similar distribution (Figure 2). It is interesting to observe that those countries with the highest publication index in Pubmed related to Optometric topics are also in the first places in the ranking of countries submitting manuscripts to Journal of Optometry (UK, USA, Australia, Canada)2.

Finally, since November 2010, all articles published in the Journal of Optometry will be readily available from Science Direct database. This is a paid database and is widely available to academics in many institutions world-wide. Furthermore, the readers of Journal of Optometry will continue to enjoy free full open-access to contents at their habitual Internet locations.

All the facts shown in this Editorial demonstrate the wide audience of the Journal of Optometry and the effort done to widespread the material published through some of the most respected database in the biomedical field. Further efforts are warranted on this regard which are among the main goals of the Journal of Optometry. In the next issue we will analyze in depth the outcomes of the manuscript submitted to the Journal and the citation index of those being accepted and published to complete this two-year perspective.