A New Chapter for the Journal of Parkinson’s Disease

DON’T MESS WITH SUCCESS

The raison d’être of the Journal of Parkinson’s Disease remains serving the international Parkinson’s disease community by providing an open forum to share, discuss, and highlight research that can enhance our understanding of this challenging disease and that can improve treatments to better the lives of people with Parkinson’s and their near ones. To do this, our primary objective continues to be publishing high-quality, rigorous, and interesting papers which span fundamental, translational, and clinical science. This has been a very successfully approach to date for JPD: its impact factor is above 5.5, placing it in the top 3 subspecialty journals focused on Parkinson’s disease or movement disorders.

SERVE THE BROAD PARKINSON’S DISEASE RESEARCH COMMUNITY

The Parkinson’s disease community that we serve includes our readers, authors, reviewers, associate editors, and editorial board. Importantly, we appreciate that people with Parkinson’s are also a crucial component of the Journal of Parkinson’s Disease community, and we are increasingly taking steps to actively engage people living with Parkinson’s in all important facets of our journal. One highly successful example is the popular and widely read publication series entitled “Parkinsons’ disease drug therapies in the clinical trial pipeline” [1–3], which we have published in the past three years under the leadership of the wonderful Parkinson’s research advocate Dr Kevin McFarthing, who himself was diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 2012 at the age of 55. These excellent reviews summarize ongoing clinical trials of symptomatic treatments and potential disease-modifying therapies for Parkinson’s. This pipeline series also greatly benefited from the support by Cure Parkinson’s, the trust founded by the late Tom Isaacs, and with whom we maintain an ongoing active partnership. We will soon expand the portfolio with an update of the pipeline of nonpharmacological interventions, and plan to establish these recurring reviews as the go-to resource for all interested in this dynamic area of research. We are also looking to re-boot the JPD Blog which is a unique venue for publishing articles by people with Parkinson’s and advocates, as well as develop other ways the Journal of Parkinson’s Disease can help us all to learn from the patient experience.

Additionally, we remain committed to enhancing our service to all other members of this community. For instance, we are striving for timely and collegial communications with authors, we are converting to a more user-friendly software system for manuscript submission and handling, and we are planning for a scheduled meeting with our associate editors and editorial board members to exchange ideas about improving the review process and developing the Journal of Parkinson’s Disease further. Another important development is that the journal is exploring the possibility of going fully Open Access in the near future, which will make all content freely available to the readership, widening the outreach and visibility of the contents.

INCREASE DIVERSITY TO WIDEN OUR PERSPECTIVES AND ENHANCE CREATIVITY

There is growing evidence that gender diversity leads to better science [4, 5], yet recent studies reveal that women are underrepresented in editorial board positions in neuroscience journals [6] and as editors-in-chief of medical journals [7]. We recognize the value of gender diversity and are proud to be moving towards gender balance at the Journal of Parkinson’s disease with both a woman and man as co-editors-in-chief. We are actively working to not only enhance gender diversity among our associate editors but also for diversity of scientific discipline, work experience, nationality, and ethnicity, which we strongly believe will further improve our peer-review process and promote creativity at the Journal of Parkinson’s Disease. We are always open to your suggestions to further expand our diversity portfolio in the coming years.

COLLABORATE, COLLABORATE, COLLABORATE

The Journal of Parkinson’s Disease is nimble and open to collaboration which provides many opportunities for innovative and impactful content that we will continue to nurture. We already mentioned our collaboration with Cure Parkinson’s and Parkinson’s research advocates to produce the Clinical Trial Pipeline series [1–3]. We intend to further develop and expand our collaboration with the Michael J. Fox Foundation in publishing replication studies to contribute to enhancing rigor in Parkinson’s disease research [8, 9]. We are excited by the return of the World Parkinson Congress and look forward to partnering with the organizers and participants to showcase the informative and inspirational content from that unique meeting. We are also open to hearing from our colleagues about specific areas that should be considered for a deep dive, for which we offer the opportunity of publishing a special issue focusing on areas that are incredibly novel, evolving quickly, particularly controversial, or under-discussed in the literature. Recent examples of successful special issues included a focus on brain repair, on technology, and on the gut-brain axis. And to serve practising clinicians, we will continue the widely read series “How I examine my patient”, where authors can showcase the art of clinical neurology in the field of Parkinson’s disease [10].

We extend our ongoing thanks to authors for submitting their manuscripts, to reviewers and editors for ensuring that the Journal of Parkinson’s Disease maintains the highest of standards, and to the readership of the Journal of Parkinson’s Disease. We look forward to working together with all of you.

CONFLICTS OF INTEREST

LVK and BRB have no conflicts of interest that are relevant to this publication.