ERJ peer reviewers: does this pillar of the Journal's quality need help?

+ T he European Respiratory Journal (ERJ) has a long history of success [1]. This success, which has allowed the Journal to keep its impact factor (IF) above 5 for 5 consecutive years, has been paralleled by the impressive growth of the European Respiratory Society (ERS) and its membership [2]. No doubt, a strong society needs a strong journal. In order to be effective, each individual manuscript should have an aim and a perspective. The aims of this Editorial are to explain to the ERJ readers why peer review is so important to the determination of Journal quality, and to present our needs in terms of reviewers' services. This exercise will be conducted from a reader's point of view first, then from an author's and the Journal's. Any given reader is interested in having the best manuscripts published in their journal. So, what defines a good manu-script? The manuscript should contain true data and novel information, should be easy to read and, ideally, should provide useful support for the reader's clinical or scientific research activity. This means that a careful selection process needs to be performed at the Editorial level. For the last 3 years, the ERJ has received an average of .2,000 manuscripts annually, covering all areas of respiratory medicine. Only 18% of these manuscripts have been published in the Journal. How is this process organised? Although largely imperfect, peer review is widely considered to be the best way of assessing scientific merit [3–5]. A difficult obstacle race with scrupulous scientific criteria has been designed to select the best manuscripts; the Chief Editors are responsible for this process, with the collaboration of the Editorial Board. After administrative checks performed by the Publications Office, the Chief Editors perform a first-screening, instantly rejecting 8% of submitted manuscripts. The remaining manuscripts are electronically sent to the relevant Associate Editor (AE) who oversees their area of interest for the Journal. The AE performs a further screening, leading to the rejection of an additional 28% of manuscripts without peer review. The remaining 64% are sent to expert reviewers for peer review; each manuscript is sent to two reviewers or more, from different areas in terms of background and geography. If the peer-review request is accepted, reviewers have 2 weeks to provide their comments to the AEs, who, based on at least two expert reviewers' opinions, formulate a proposal for rejection, revision or acceptance. This …