With this issue, the European Journal of Human Genetics has entered its 12th year. The last year has seen major changes, leading to a strongly increased international visibility. First, the EJHG has now been firmly rooted in the stable of Nature Publishing Group publications. It is scanned monthly by the NPG staff for newsworthy topics, which are highlighted on the Genetics page of the nature.com website, and, occasionally, even on the nature.com home page. So far, every month one of the EJHG manuscripts’ author teams has received an e-mail indicating that their paper has thus been brought to the attention of a much wider audience. Further, the full content of the paper in question is made freely available to non-EJHG subscribers. This has resulted in a major boost for the hit rate of the EJHG home page increasing more than tenfold.

Secondly, the manuscript processing has undergone two significant changes as well. Early in 2003, the EJHG moved to full electronic submission. Prospective authors can upload their manuscripts, figures, additional documentation as well as submission letters via the website, getting initial pdf files back for input quality control, and then the entire reviewing process is managed via the web. This has further truncated delays in the various steps between editors, reviewers and authors, and improved our process oversight.

Finally, in September the EJHG initiated Advance Online Publication (AOP). This means that the finally accepted manuscripts are now available online, and thus for referencing, four to five weeks after final acceptance. This is well in advance of their appearance in print, as it depends on the balance between page budget and the influx of accepted manuscripts.

The EJHG enjoys an ever-increasing number of submissions, perhaps as part due to these quite visible improvements, but most likely also caused by the relentless progress of molecular genetics and genomics technologies, clinical insights, stronger biostatistics approaches, and not to forget the populations’ mounting attention for genetics, increasingly causing them to seek genetic counselling. Moreover, the submissions from other continents are on the rise, notably from North America. This development has allowed us to raise the acceptation bar during the last year, and we expect that this will have a positive effect on our impact score.

In short, reasons enough for our readers to send their next paper in any field related to human genetics to the EJHG. Especially since besides all of the above, the top 3 cited papers for any given year, will be given free entry to next year's ESHG Conference and a year's subcription/membership free.