EDITORIAL

Arnaldo Augusto Franco de Siqueira

Departamento de Saúde Materno-Infantil da Faculdade de Saúde Pública da Universidade de São Paulo

This issue of the Journal of Human Growth and Development (Vol. 22 No. 2) deserves a special celebration and represents an important watershed.

As founder of the Journal and its current Editor, I take this opportunity to give some news about recent and important events for our employees, members of the Advisory Board, researchers and professionals who have honored us by submitting their articles to our Journal, for the experts who have helped us improve it through their contribution as referees, and last but equally important, for our readers.

This issue 22 (2) provides, as usual, significant contributions, scoring once again our features (that much we value), i.e. to seek interdisciplinary, focusing on different aspects of growth and human development, with topics of interest to researchers and scholars from different fields of knowledge, not failing to take into account the social context in which these processes have been unfolded.

So we can celebrate the fact we are receiving an increasing number of submissions of very good texts in general, what already ensure us a regularity and certainty that, in the coming years, we will be able to launch three issues per year, with 15 to 20 articles each. It is important to guarantee this "production" keeping the requirements of quality and relevance of the texts, because the databases on which the Journal is inscribed make this requirement.

The first decision to comment is the modification of the name of the Journal, to enlarge its scope: it is renamed Journal of Human Growth and Development (JHGD). Then we decided to publish it in English. With these decisions, we can celebrate a significant increase in submissions of articles by authors from other countries, confirming our belief that our Journal is opening a space for those interested in different aspects of growth and development.

We can ensure the Brazilian researchers that the access to the Journal remains open, and we can continue to count on the cooperation of all, with a big advantage: our articles are now being entirely read by the international community. It is also important to report that the Journal is now part of Scopus database and, from 2013, we will have our bibliometric evaluation, what will contribute to a fairer concept of JHGD by the organs of scientific reviewers.

Finally, we communicate - hence the idea of watershed - this is the last number of JHGD on paper. It has been published on paper and electronic media, but from issue nr 22 (3) the Journal will come out only in electronic form, in English and Portuguese, following a trend that seems consolidated. It is worth mentioning that it will continue free the access to the full content of JHGD, because we believe that the open access to the publication, both inside and outside the academia, allows anyone in the world with a computer to have access to scientific research. We are absolutely certain that this will change the nature of scientific publications and make science more accessible.

Manuscript submitted Apr 04 2012
Accepted for publication Mai 02 2012