Impact Factor 1.112 for Interactive CardioVascular and Thoracic Surgery: a well-deserved recognition for all contributors.

Interactive CardioVascular and Thoracic Surgery (ICVTS: www. ICVTS.org) has been allocated a 2012 Impact Factor (IF) of 1.112. This is a very adequate reward for all contributors who have entrusted their work to ICVTS, the editorial team, the sponsoring European Association for Cardio-Thoracic Surgery (EACTS, www. eacts.org) and the publishers. It is worthy of note that ICVTS was founded as a spin-off from the very successful European Journal of Cardio-Thoracic Surgery (www.ejcts.org) in order to create very early on (in comparison with the established scientific press), a free-access experimental communication platform taking advantage of new media, including videos and sound, the worldwide web as well as online discussions [1]. Indeed, a non-conventional approach for making available new ideas, work-in-progress reports, brief communications, negative results, proposals for bailout procedures, case reports, state-of-the-art papers and the very successful Best BETs introduced by Dunning et al. [2] etc., to a broader public. In general, this became possible from the very beginning by the free-access concept, but more specifically through CTSNet (www.ctsnet.org), the cardiothoracic surgeons’ network with >30 000 members worldwide at the time ICVTS started. CTSNet was an initiative of Bob Replogle who convinced the leadership of The Society of Thoracic Surgeons (www.sts.org), the American Association for Thoracic Surgery (www.aats.org) and EACTS to sponsor this global enterprise [3]. But it was the Editor-in-Chief of CTSNet, the late Tom Ferguson, who made the decision to include ICVTS in the very exclusive journal section of CTSNet [4], alongside such prestigious journals as the Annals of Thoracic Surgery (Editor-in-Chief: L.H. Edmunds), the Journal of