Another year has passed and it is time once again to update you of the steady upward progress that your journal has been making over the past few years. We are now entering a period of stability and growth, and we fully expect that the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition (EJCN) will continue to flourish successfully in the years ahead.

The impact factor has increased yet again and is now at 2.686. This is the third annual consecutive increase in our impact factor and we will strive to keep it rising. The Journal also retains its position among other nutrition and related journals, although the number of journals in this grouping has increased. Our rejection rates, we expect, will stabilize over 70% while we endeavour to reduce the time to publication even further. In 2009, the mean number of days to final decision dropped to 40 and over 70% of the manuscripts accepted were published online within 25 days. In 2010 we aim to reduce our turnaround times further and increase the percentage of manuscripts published online within 25 days, although we of course depend on the prompt attention of authors towards returning revisions and proofs to achieve this goal. We are also pleased that the interval between online publication and the print version is now within a very acceptable limit of 10–12 weeks.

Much of the success of this journal is dependent on quality peer reviews. We are truly grateful for the generosity of our reviewers and editorial board members who provide prompt and informative reviews that enable us to make quick decisions on manuscripts. Our Publishers are continuously exploring avenues to reward reviewers for the time and effort they contribute to the Journal.

Ensuring an active Editorial Board has been one of our objectives. We now have Professor Hautvast as our Editorial Advisor and Chairman of the Editorial Board. The practice of replacing a third of the Editorial Board every 2 or 3 years is now being implemented. I would like to express my gratitude to those members of the Editorial Board who have recently stepped down, while welcoming our new members whose input and support I look forward to over the next few years.

The journal has now introduced ‘Systematic Reviews’ as a new article type in addition to ‘Invited Reviews’, and hence I would encourage the submission of any such reviews you undertake, for publication in EJCN. Although we have discontinued ‘Case Reports’, we are now looking forward to publishing a greater number of clinical and intervention trials, both epidemiological and clinical. We will be stipulating that these trials are registered with the appropriate agencies and follow the guidelines set out in our recently revised Instructions to Authors.

EJCN now publishes several invited reviews and supplements every year. A number of our supplements in the last few years contain important reviews solicited for and used as background material for Expert meetings of United Nations agencies such as the World Health Organization (WHO). In this issue we publish the background documents presented at the WHO's recent Expert Consultation on Waist Hip Ratio and Waist Circumference. I would like to encourage our readers to submit proposals for invited reviews and supplements for future issues of our journal.

The office of the Publishing Manager of EJCN is now back in the UK after a few years based in New York. I would like to welcome Lucinda Haines, who has recently taken over this post in London and has already been very active in ensuring that we achieve many of the goals we have set out for the journal. I would also like to express my thanks to EJCN's Publisher, Pooja Agarwal, under whose overall leadership our journal is well looked after at the Nature Publishing Group.

On behalf of the Associate Editors and myself, I wish all our readers and authors a wonderful New Year and look forward to your support to EJCN in the years ahead.