key: cord-0711159-psdykjv6
authors: Paz-Pacheco, Elizabeth
title: A Decade of Growth
date: 2021-05-27
journal: J ASEAN Fed Endocr Soc
DOI: 10.15605/jafes.036.01.17
sha: efd3c34968846d7c51621fda34645cc2c9dc1042
doc_id: 711159
cord_uid: psdykjv6

nan

Over the last 10 years, JAFES has grown into an internationally recognized, world-class publication, incorporating best practices on scholarly research.

We are 100% open access, making all the science available and accessible to everyone, without asking for subscription or download fees, without levying any article processing charges to submitting authors. JAFES has invested in information-technology driven tools and applications to provide articles that are easily searchable, reader-friendly, and permanent in the online scholarly publishing ecosystem. We put a premium on ethical research, subscribing to international reporting standards. We have improved the communication of findings by converting original articles to visual abstracts that are promoted through social media for both practitioners and lay readers, to enhance patient education. 2 We are proud to say that we are among the pioneers in the region. We look forward to an evaluation of these processes, to help us improve further.

JAFES is now indexed in PubMed Central, Scopus™ and Web of Science™ as well as the Western Pacific Region Index Medicus and Directory of Open Access Journals. Indeed, ensuring the visibility of our authors' outputs is a top priority of JAFES.

Relevance and applicability of our publication to our patients in the region is the key goal. We have been highlighting themes of crucial value, starting off with diabetes and the metabolic syndrome, where rates in the region are clearly increasing, occurring at a younger age and with visceral obesity, phenotypes different from our Western counterparts. We have also focused on country practice guidelines, as an initial step towards collaboration within the leaders in the AFES countries. As the COVID-19 pandemic occurred in 2020, AFES editors also initiated a survey on ASEAN needs, with the intent of providing a platform for discussions on these interim reports and practices. We are, in a longerterm view, recognizing the need for understanding endocrine conditions at another level, encouraging molecular and "-omics" research in the region. 

Editor-in-Chief Borrowing words from my editorial five years ago, "We feel nostalgic looking back at the work accomplished and the work at hand. With unwavering passion, we reared the journal like our child, full of ambition and hope, celebrating small victories, committing some mistakes in the process, but learning, continually learning, as we go. Each issue, a genuine product of sleepless editorial nights, was like a milestone, from learning to sit to learning to crawl, from crawling to pulling to stand, from standing to finally taking one step, two steps then three." 3 Both as the child and the tree, with commitment and care by AFES, JAFES continues to grow.

We are dedicating this issue to Dr. Jose Ma. C. Avila who passed away this year. He was instrumental in providing vital foundations for the revitalized journal, guiding us on the editorial process and teaching us how to manage the journal's operations. Joey was a classmate from medical school, a good friend, a university professor, a leader in Pathology. For this, we will always be grateful.

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