EJNMMI Physics - an editor's perspective

According to Wikipedia, an editorial is an ‘opinion piece written by the senior editorial staff ’ and supposed ‘to reflect the opinion of the periodical’. This editorial is then somewhat different, as it opens the floor to a new journal, which has not yet any periodicity. However, this new journal deserves an introduction, and an editorial ever more. EJNMMI Physics was launched in late 2013 at the Annual Meeting of the European Association of Nuclear Medicine in Lyon [1]. It pairs with the already existing EJNMMI Research journal, edited by Angelika Bischof-Delaloye. Both, the Research and the Physics journal, are open-access associates to EJNMMI that is edited by Ignasi Carrio and recently reported an impact factor of 5.113 [2]. EJNMMI Physics is far away from any impact factor, yet. We appreciate the appeal and the need of impact factors, and we are certain that together we can build this journal into a scientific platform for applied physics, which in due course can be awarded an impact factor. Our certainty stems from the fact that physics, while being an integral part of medicine, and nuclear medicine in particular, is underrepresented in the relevant medical journals. Therefore, EJNMMI Physics intends to support the presentation of physics and physics-related matters as an integral part of nuclear medicine in particular. It aims at providing a forum to scientifically minded people engaged and interested in nuclear medicine and associate imaging and therapeutic applications. As such, EJNMMI Physics complements its partner journal EJNMMI Research and supports EJNMMI, which focuses mainly on clinical perspectives of nuclear medicine. EJNMMI Physics welcomes original materials and studies with a focus on applied physics, mathematics, as well as imaging system engineering and prototyping in nuclear medicine. This includes physics-driven approaches or algorithms supported by physics that foster early clinical adoption of nuclear medicine imaging and therapy regimens. More specifically, we introduce a number of manuscript categories to better reflect the current scope of physics-driven research in this particular field of medicine: ‘Original articles’ are manuscripts that describe unique scientific contributions, starting with a hypothesis, clearly defined materials and methods, presenting results and an unbiased discussion and conclusion. A special category of this type of manuscripts is ‘Short communications’ which describe unique scientific contributions based on an abbreviated study presenting first results of promising nature that appeals to the field of physics in nuclear medicine. Further to this, it is planned to introduce a category of