The journal’s motto, “A journal by everyone and for everyone,” must fulfill its objective. It must be a journal by and for all members, which translates into active participation in each role we play so that the journal becomes remarkable in importance, reference, impact, quality, and content of scientific articles.

In our environment, scientific journals are supported by a university or some association, and these are judged substantially by their scientific production, represented in the quantity and quality of papers their scholars or members publish periodically. Some ethical standards provide that a scientific journal of a university or association is not intended to be the publication body of its own research. In other words, with some exceptions, high-impact journals should not be backed by the scientific production of their house (endogamy). For us, these approaches are hard to adopt.

Furthermore, the incentive for researchers to publish in national journals is extremely poor, beyond philosophical convictions. Thus, the vicious circle that “the journal has no impact factor because high-impact articles are not published” cannot be broken.

Another aspect to highlight is that every day, we need national articles to be referenced within the bibliography, i.e., that every time we publish an article, we can know what has been published in national literature.

The editorial board’s work is based on the process comprising the reception of the manuscripts, their preliminary evaluation, the assignment of expert peers, the acceptance or rejection of the article following the opinions of these reviewers, the layout, and the publication of approved papers.

The journal has continued to publish four issues per year. For this last quarter, a supplement issue titled “Colombian Consensus on Pediatric Inflammatory Bowel Disease” was published ¹.

In the last two years (01/01/2021 to 12/31/2022), we received 235 articles, of which 155 were accepted and 102 were rejected. The acceptance rate is 59%, and the rejection rate is 41%.

On March 1, 2023, a webinar was held on “Case Reports in Medical Literature,” with Dr. Scott R. Steele as a guest and Dr. Juan Carlos Reyes as the moderator.

We continue working with Biteca, which manages the journal’s OJS platform and provides permanent support.

In the last 12 months, the average number of visits to the journal ranged between 2,500 and 3,600 per month.

In the editorial process, the assignment and selection of expert reviewers are vital for the paper to have an accurate assessment, review, and relevant recommendations.

Statistics

We have updated the public view of our website traffic statistics to information already collected by Google Analytics since January 2023. These statistics show the countries visiting our journal (Table 1) ².

Table 1 Visits to the journal by country in the last year (11/01/2022-11/01/2023)