Dear readers:

ISPUB.COM continues to grow and is under continuous improvement as it is The Internet Journal of Emergency and Intensive Care Medicine. Earlier last year, we changed the look and the user interface of the site as many readers have noticed. We reached an agreement with the Distant Learning University of Athabasca, which is the biggest distant learning institution in Canada, and the International Consortium for Advancement of Academic Publication (ICAAP) that provide us with academic and technical support and high-speed server technology. The web site moved to Canada in June and the server is located in their campus at the city of Athabasca, Alberta, Canada. For more information about the university you can visit their site at: http://www.athabascau.ca/main/intro.htm

In June 2000, Mike Sosteric was appointed as new Chief Information Officer (CIO) of www.ispub.com, he is also the director of ICAAP and has enormous experience with electronic publishing and web programming. Sosteric and his crew have converted 99% of all ispub.com content from HTML to XML, a new and better coding language for web sites like ours. Sosteric is now in charge of the technical back end of the web site. Last November, we implemented a new server technology called server cluster technology and now, we have 3 high speed server connected to each other, which are ready to distribute the server workload and guarantee 100% uptime.

We have recently implemented a new “personalized” subscriber database that allows us now to provide customized services to our readers. Other new services such as separate sites for handheld devices (Palm Pilots / Pocket PCs site) and cellular phones (WAP site) will be announced soon. We have improved our online article submission system that automatically generates the difficult XML code. We are in the process of joining forces with the online publishing software company PeerView.com and are currently founding a new electronic publishing initiative called BlueSky. The BlueSky initiative will implement a complete web-based automated online manuscript management system and allow you and the authors to track the review process.

Our latest statistics show:

• Average hits per day: around 41,000 (peak up to 68,000 per day)

• Average readers per day: around 1,750 (peak up to 3,000 per day)

• Average page views per day: around 6,400 (peak up to 16,500 per day)

• Number subscriptions: 70,000 (old database)

• Links to ispub.com from other web sites around the world: 2,430

• We were rated to be the 11,429th most popular web site in the world (out of the millions of web sites)

Our editorial board has been enriched with many internationally recognized authorities in intensive care in the last year as you can see by linking to that section of the journal. The IJEICM and other ISPUB Journals have also won many awards that are enumerated and described at http://www.ispub.com/awards.htm

In summary, there are tremendous changes going on as you read this. Please encourage your friends and colleagues to submit interesting case reports, reviews, and original articles to the journals. For those that want to submit their work the information necessary can be found at http://www.ispub.com/journals/instructions.htm and for those interested in the history of the journals, you can find a brief summary of the evolution of the journals since their foundation back in 1995 at http://www.ispub.com/news.htm. We want to express our gratitude to the readers and contributors for your support in the past 6 years and in the future. We hope you enjoy this issue.

Joseph L. Nates, MD

Editor-in-Chief IJEICM

Oliver Wenker, MD

Associate Editor IJEICM and CEO ISPUB.COM