I hope you like the new look of Eye as we move forward into 2009. The monthly change of the front cover image is just one of the several developments planned for 2009, and it symbolises the editorial board's desire to continually improve the journal. Our goal is to ensure that you will enjoy reading Eye and that it continues to be relevant to your practice.

Other developments this year include the publication of bumper issues of Eye to address the historical backlog of articles waiting to be printed. This will dramatically reduce the time from article acceptance to publication. To maintain this short publication time, we will continue to only accept the highest quality articles. Therefore, postal surveys, audits, and articles with small numbers of subjects (unless dealing with a unique population) are unlikely to be accepted. Articles, which highlight novel findings and/or large prospective studies are always welcome.

Guidelines to authors are on our website. As a service to authors, we have recently revised our decision letters to make it explicitly clear what revisions are needed for an article to be accepted for publication.

A further initiative planned for this year will be the introduction of CME credit for Eye articles. In addition, we plan to enhance the readability of articles with the introduction of summary boxes to alert the reader to the salient findings of an article.

Finally, we will be introducing an exciting new article type entitled ‘Controversy’ and also seeking to increase the number of review articles accepted by Eye.

As I start my second year as the Editor of Eye, I would like to thank the editorial board and our reviewers for their hard work that goes largely unseen. Thank you to the authors who send their work to Eye. For our readers, I hope you will find these changes useful.