Dear colleagues,
I would like to inform you that I have decided to step down from my Editor-in-Chief-position at Tissue Barriers to dedicate more time to my research program and other duties. Dr. Kursad Turksen from the Ottawa Health Research Institute at the University of Ottawa [Senior Scientist, retired] has been selected as the new Editor-in-Chief of Tissue Barriers, effective on January 1, 2019. Dr. Turksen is a renowned expert in the field of tight junctions and regulation of Claudin structure and functions, most especially in the epidermal lineage and epidermal development. He has significant experience as a journal and book editor, having served as the Editor-in-Chief for the Stem Cell Reviews and Reports journal and as an executive board member for the Springer Protocols On-Line. Dr. Turksen has organized and published several successful Special Issues of Tissue Barriers, and I am confident that our journal will continue to thrive under his leadership.
To me, it was a great experience to help launch and develop Tissue Barriers. I really enjoyed my interactions with many great scientists, having a unique opportunity to accelerate a cross-talk between different fields of tissue barrier research and to highlight rapidly growing or potentially interesting areas of investigations. I believe we had a successful six-year run for the journal. Tissue Barriers published a number of interesting and well-cited papers. Furthermore, the journal has been accepted and is included into key bibliographic databases such as PubMed Central, Medline and Scopus. Tissue Barriers has a 2017 CiteScore of 3.98, ranking 7 of 61 journals in Scopus’ Histology category and is a Quartile 1 ranked biochemistry and histology journal according to the Scimago Journal & Country Rank (SJR).
I am grateful to the Editorial Board members of Tissue Barriers for their support and contribution to the success of the journal. I am also very grateful to the Taylor and Francis management team, who constantly works on improving the submission and publication process. A recent and exciting development in the handling of manuscripts submitted to Tissue Barriers is the implementation of Format-free Submission, which means that researchers will not be required to follow a specific set of formatting rules when submitting their paper. This will make the process of preparing research papers for submission simpler and less time-consuming.
Best wishes to the new Editor-in Chief of Tissue Barriers, and I look forward to seeing the continuous development of our great journal.