Open access efforts begin to bloom: ESC Heart Failure gets full attention and first impact factor

Abstract In 2014, the Heart Failure Association (HFA) of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) founded the first open access journal focusing on heart failure, called ESC Heart Failure (ESC‐HF). In the first 5 years, in ESC‐HF we published more than 450 articles. Through ESC‐HF, the HFA gives room for heart failure research output from around the world. A transfer process from the European Journal of Heart Failure to ESC‐HF has also been installed. As a consequence, in 2018 ESC‐HF received 289 submissions, and published 148 items (acceptance rate 51%). The journal is listed in Scopus since 2014 and on the PubMed website since 2015. In 2019, we received our first impact factor from ISI Web of Knowledge / Thomson‐Reuters, which is 3.407 for 2018. This report reviews which papers get best cited. Not surprisingly, many of the best cited papers are reviews and facts & numbers mini reviews, but original research is also well cited.

Does the world need an open access journal focusing on heart failure, some asked in 2014 when ESC Heart Failure (for short: ESC-HF) had just been launched during the annual congress of the Heart Failure Association (HFA) of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC). Today, we are looking back at five years of activity with more than 450 published reviews, editorials, facts & numbers mini reviews, letters, and, most importantly, original research articles. In the first year, it was not always easy to fill the journal, but today, this is no longer an issue. In 2018, we have received 289 submissions and published 148 items-an acceptance rate of just above 50%.
In 2015, our publishers Wiley and we managed to get ESC-HF listed on the PubMed website. This helped our visibility and resulted in a strong increase in submissions following this. For the aficionados of these processes, we know that only a Medline acceptance truly guarantees a full PubMed listingbut our Medline application (submitted March 2017) was successful, and full MEDLINE indexing started with the 2017 volume.
Besides PubMed, one can find ESC-HF articles via Google Scholar since 2014. ESC-HF is also listed in Scopus since 2014 (see http://www.scopus.com-this is the search system of Elsevier). In the summer of 2018, we received confirmation of our acceptance by ISI Web of Knowledge (Thomson-Reuters) to be considered for assessment of citations and impact factor retrospectively since the start of the journal for their 2018 Journal Citation Report to come out mid-2019. This is where things got interesting and several people performed analyses as to what our impact factor will be. At the HFA congress, we mentioned that it should be at least 3.3-we can now say that it is 3.407 for 2018. We are listed in the field 'Cardiac & Cardiovascular Systems' at position 49 of 136. This is a great success for the HFA and the editorial board together with our reviewers and for all of the heart failure research community. We have established an open access journal in the field of heart failure research. A very big thank you to all of you who contribute to the journal's progress and success and of course also to our many readers for whom we are doing this.  For the aficionados of technical details, we also would like to give you the details as to how our impact factor came about. The Impact Factor 2018 is calculated based on the citations in 2018 to items published in ESC-HF in the two years before that, that is, in 2016 and 2017. This number (which is 402) is then divided by the sum of full articles (i.e. reviews and original papers) published in 2016/2017. In 2016, we published 35 full papers, and in 2017, there were 83 papers. The sum of these two years was 118, and considering the above mentioned 402 citations to these papers in the literature in 2018, our impact factor was calculated to be 3.407.
As an indication of which papers published in ESC-HF have received most citations, we include a table that is based on ISI Web of Knowledge, as assessed on 3 August 2019, to show all articles published in 2016-2018 in ESC-HF with >5 citations so far. Not surprisingly, many of the best cited papers are reviews and facts & numbers mini reviews, but original research is also well cited. (Table 1).
There is a lot of work where people say that nothing is really wrong with it. It may just be a little small in study size, lacking the extra control group or extra biomarker tests that some would have hoped for or that simply, for these and many other reasons, may not have priority for the limited publication space in the premier cardiology and heart failure specialist journals. We want to give room for the many other good pieces of heart failure research from around the world. This is also why we have installed a transfer process from the European Journal of Heart Failure to ESC-HF, which is now the source of half of all submissions to our journal.
To manage the increasing number of submissions while maintaining a reasonable time from submission to review decision and Early View publication, we have substantially increased the size of the editorial board. If some of you feel qualified and are interested to help in this, please let us know. The biggest problem we face for a timely publication process is finding reviewers for your submissions. As many have asked in this context, we do not mind if you inform us about previous reviewer comments in your submission cover letters, but we then also request that you add response comments in your submission package for us to consider. But of course, we will trigger also our own reviewer activities. And for this, a longer rather than shorter list of suggested reviewers would also be very helpful if you want to technically support your submission to ESC-HF.
We hope that together we can keep the journal at a good quality standard, even if more papers are published in the future. We strongly suspect that submissions will further increase. From 2018 to 2019, the projected growth in submissions is >30%. And we apologize already, if sometimes there are still some delays. We do our best with the staff in Berlin and Göttingen and Debrecen. And if you sometimes feel that we are like the PLoS-ONE of heart failure, then indeed this is what we wish to be, the major publication threshold being that the work under consideration is 'scientifically sound'. But there are two major differences, which is that we have the support of a strong society and that a good proportion of the papers we accept also comes out in print.
At last, some also have asked us about our plans and ambitions for future impact factors of ESC-HF. We are not striving to get the top of heart failure research-we know that they primarily published elsewhere. We are aiming for an impact factor above 4, but we are committed to essentially unlimited growth of the journal. We are aiming for an acceptance rate of 40-50%. We believe that the main job of a journal like ours is to give room for discussion and for any interesting research. We are aiming to get your research published, let you keep the copyright, and make the research available for the whole world to read at no cost. This is the open access model at work for heart failure. This is ESC Heart Failure for you.