Farewell and Welcome <i>Journal of Sleep Research</i>

Dear members of the ESRS/readers of JSR, Welcome to the sixth edition of the Journal of Sleep Research in 2025, which will be published in December. Many of you will know already that my tenureship as Editor-in-Chief (EIC) of the Journal of Sleep Research will expire at the end of this year 2025—hence the title. Please allow me a few words about the last 9 years from 2017 to 2025. I was happy to take over at first partial Editorship from Derk-Jan Dijk in summer 2016, who before had steered JSR for 6 years in a very successful manner for the European Sleep Research Society (ESRS). So I was well aware of the big footsteps I had to follow and initially also a bit anxious to live up to the expectations of our readers, all our editors and the then board of the ESRS. It turned out I need not worry so much as I had the help of Brigitte Knobl, our editorial manager. Work with her always was very swift, to the point and characterised by mutual understanding and friendship. Brigitte has now retired in July, and I do wish her all the best for her retirement. Through my work with JSR, I was propelled into the larger world of publishing in sleep research and sleep medicine: what a wonderful, diverse and challenging world that is! I guess during my editorship probably more than 7000 manuscripts went “over my table”, that is, were viewed by me on my computer. JSR now has seen a steady increase of submissions from 460 in 2017 to around 1800 in 2025—what an explosion of publishing activities! When we first noticed this trend a few years ago, we did interpret this very positively, assuming that this trend is due to a heightened attractivity of authors in the sleep field. As of today, my view of this is more realistic and even negative. Having a closer look at our submissions, it turns out that not the quality of submissions but just the quantity of submissions has drastically increased, coupled with a far higher rejection rate of manuscripts in order to keep our high scientific standards intact. This has also led to an increase of Deputy and Associate Editors, because the workload increased so much. The same applies for our reviewers, and I now can fully understand that frequently our requests for reviewing are turned down or not even answered. What a calm and relaxed world scientific publishing was when I entered the field myself around 40 years ago. I remember fondly how keen I was to review other papers by myself at that time, and I always tried to be fair and on time. Given the flood of manuscripts, probably most scientific journals are faced with now, it is highly likely that the reviewer problem will further increase. However, I do not want to get nostalgic now: Many things have improved very much in the last decades—we do handle manuscripts much swifter now than we did in the past. Thus, feedback to authors is much quicker, and it always was my aim to keep authors not too long in the wait. I hope I was successful there, though I have to admit that, unfortunately, there were some negative outliers—my apologies go to the authors! My editorial team and I were always keen on including a balanced selection of topics from sleep research and sleep medicine, and I hope that we managed to do so. At this point, I want to thank all the authors, reviewers and members of the editorial board of JSR—it was such a pleasure to work with all of you, and the experience of being part of a dynamic scientific community has carried me through the 9 years of editorship. I also want to thank the several acting boards of the ESRS during this time for their support. JSR is the journal of the ESRS and, as such, our society's flagship. I sincerely hope that I have been able to carry the “torch” for the last 9 years in a very visible fashion for our field and the society. I am very glad that the board of the ESRS selected Prof. Hans-Peter Landolt as my successor. Johanna Ell already took over the position of editorial assistant from Brigtte Knobl. We already do work closely together now in order to guarantee a smooth transition. Hans-Peter Landolt not only will simply continue my work, but he does have plenty of ideas to rejuvenate the journal. I do sincerely wish Hans-Peter and Johanna the best of luck for the future. So now it is time for me to say goodbye to all of you in my function as EIC of JSR—it is worth staying with the ESRS and JSR! The author declares no conflicts of interest.