Dear friends, colleagues, contributors, reviewers and readers

With the advent of a new IMS Board under the leadership of Professor Susan Davis, I thought it timely to bring you all up to date with the progress of our journal.

At the recent 16th IMS World Congress on the Menopause in Vancouver, Canada, our Editorial Board, Editors and publisher met to discuss progress and future plans. We will continue to publish six issues per year and, within those issues, we will from time to time have special themed issues with high-level reviews on topics of importance to us all. The first of these was on screening for women at midlife and was published in June. Our August issue will focus on Progesterone in its many guises. More special issues are planned as well, including one focusing on papers presented at the recent World Congress. We will continue to publish occasional issues of Climacteric in Chinese, including, from 2019, abstracts in Chinese available on line. I am hopeful that we may be able to establish a Spanish-language equivalent in the near future.

I am pleased to advise that Taylor & Francis will remain the publisher of Climacteric under a new 5-year contract signed in Vancouver.

I am also delighted to inform you that the most recent Impact Factor for Climacteric is 2.807, an increase of over 23% and the highest in the journal’s history. This is a testimony to our authors and to the standard of scientific papers published in our journal.

The Impact Factor is also a testimony to the hard work of our peer reviewers, our management team and our Editors, most particularly Nick Panay and Anna Fenton who were Joint Editors-in-Chief of Climacteric until September 2016. I wish to thank them and to congratulate all involved.

Finally, I would like to encourage you to send your research and your reviews to Climacteric. Our Impact Factor is strong, our time from submission to acceptance is an average of 30 days and we are very keen to make that even shorter. We have a team of Associate Editors strategically located in different regions of our world to help and advise you. Our website has comprehensive guidelines on how to prepare your paper (and your research) and how to submit. For papers of greatest impact and importance, we are able to offer free online open access for a limited period of time.

I wish you good health, happiness and great research.

Rod Baber