EDITOR’S COMMENT

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            What does lead an author to submit his or her research to a journal? Probably the impact factor (IF) is a number one consideration. However the impact factor is directly correlated to the rejection rate of a journal which means that is very hard to get a paper published in a journal with a high IF. Furthermore, editors of IF-driven journals try to select highly cited areas to publish.             Other factors that are important to the investigator are a high visibility of the journal, a short time between submission and publication and a friendly submission process. IBJU IF for 2011 was 1.04, which is very reasonable among Brazilian journals and we are making some changes, which will increase our attractiveness to authors. IBJU is already an open-access journal with submissions at no cost, which gives a great exposition to the published papers; furthermore, we just created a Ahead of Print section which will permit that a manuscript can be launch in the website, and consequently indexed, as soon as it has been approved through the peer-review. This will decrease substantially the publication time.
            Finally we will move our submission process to an electronic one in the near future through an electronic program called Scholar One,. This change will be possible because a initiative of SciELO, who is offering this support at no cost to the Brazilian journals who are in SciELO's database. IBJU Editors have been considering to move to an electronic submission program for a long time and thank to SciELO we will do it without any expense to the Brazilian Society of Urology.
            We are increasing the tools that can attract more good papers to IBJU, which in the end will increase our IF. In this competitive editorial word IBJU is more and more ready to be a winner!

Enjoy our journal!

Sidney Glina, MD, PhD
Editor, International Braz J Urol