To understand the evolution of a scientific journal which is the official publication of a society it is important to know the origins of that society.
The Spanish Paediatric Association accepted the inception of a Section on Clinical Immunology and Paediatric Allergy in 1972, although the real beginning did not took place until 1976, during the National Congress of Paediatrics, which was held in Barcelona, after a previous meeting that maintained some time before in Segovia. The start of the Section was justified in order to know the number of paediatricians that had Allergy as a preferred or unique dedication, their level of knowledge and the development of the public and private clinical units devoted to it. In the beginning, several joint projects were worked on, and in the first meetings of the already Society, only free presentations were accepted. This break-in period of four years was very positive, and the Section developed greatly. In 1995 the Section turned into Society, what allowed the bylaws to adapt to the specific needs of the members.
In these more than 40 years there have been many different Steering Committees and a lot of scientific meetings have taken place. Also, different specific committees have been created, focusing on diverse areas of the specialty, and different position papers have been been put forward. Since 1996 the journal Allergologia et Immunopathologia has been the official journal of the Society, which has allowed to disseminate enormously the work of the members of the Society.
Twenty-five years ago, Doyma publishing group -an important medical and scientific publisher in Spanish and leader in biomedical journals in that language, the majority of which were official journals of prestigious scientific societies- established an agreement with our society by which in exchange of supporting the name of the journal, the publisher took charge of all publication processes for free, including not only publishing but also marketing, commercial exploitation and subscriptions in order to cover the costs. Those were the times when pharmaceutical companies invested a great deal of funds in advertising on paper.
In 2004, the President of the Society at that time, Dr. Jesús Garde, signed a new contract with Doyma changing the model. Consequently, Doyma handed publicity exploitation over to SEICAP which had to reimburse the publisher for publication processes. In that contract, there was an agreement by which the brand name of the journal would be transferred from Doyma to SEICAP in 2006.
In 2006, when the editor-in-chief was Dr. Francisco Muñoz, the journal started to be published only in English, and thus consultations through the internet increased considerably as well as its international visibility.
In January 2008, a big step forward was achieved when Allergologia et Immunopathologia was included in the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) by Thomson Scientific at that time. This allowed the journal to be part of the most prestigious publications in the scientific world: the “impact factor journal club”, which make it possible for a journal to compete with other journals in order to increment the precious index.
At the end of 2013 the revenues from subscriptions and publicity decreased enormously and were not enough neither to maintain de paper printing in colour nor to distribute the 1000 printed issues by surface mail. Thus, at the end of that year a new contract was signed by which the journal was published online only.
In 2016 the contract was further modified and the former Doyma, then Elsevier Spain, cancelled the revenues to the journal from institutional subscriptions, but not the personal ones, although in exchange the amount of papers per issue was significantly increased to 104 pages at the same cost.
In the fall of the present year 2020 the steering committee received the approval from the assembly of members held virtually for obvious reasons on October the 2nd for the selling of our journal to Codon Publications, based in Singapore and Australia, which -we hope- will allow the journal continue being the official publication of our society.
All changes occurred to the journal since SEICAP is responsible of it have been addressed to facilitate its survival as the official publication of it and to maintain a way to disseminate within the scientific community the achievements of its members; and, at the same time, trying that the economic costs were bearable. This last change affecting the publisher of the journal goes on the same lines. Both the current steering committee of the Society and the assembly -which approved the change by a great majority- agree in the change being for the better. Only time can say it, but it augurs well.
From these lines I would like to thank Elsevier all these years of good of collaboration and dedication to our journal, as well as to all the past editors-in-chief, specially to Dr. Francisco Muñoz; and to the current one, Prof. Luis García-Marcos.
SEICAP President
