At the dawn of 2019, the Section Editors and the Editorial Board members of the Journal of Cell Communication and Signaling (JCCS) join me in wishing all our authors and readers a very happy new year, with plenty of personal satisfaction and professional success.

We also wish to renew our gratitude to the authors for the confidence and support that they have shown in our journal.

As we previously mentioned on several occasions, JCCS aims to provide a high quality medium for the publication of fundamental and translational research related to Intercellular communication and interactions with the cellular microenvironment that plays critical functions in the normal and pathological signaling pathways that control cell proliferation, differentiation and death.

The choice that we have made to maintain a printed version of our journal was based on the results of studies that establish the power of print over electronic reading (see for example in this journal Perbal B 2017a and Gabaron S 2017).

We do not ignore the well established fact that many scientists search electronic databases for their bibliography. In a recent article, (Perbal A and Perbal B 2016) we have shown that in the CCN field, the use of large databases such as PubMed, may not be the best choice when used alone.

Neither do we ignore that many of our colleagues have the feeling that it is better to have authors pay for submitting a manuscript and getting it published than paying for reading articles.

What are the choices presently offered to people who wish to be informed and have access to all types of political, social, technical, news that have an impact on their daily life?

They either turn to reliable sources of journalism and buy newspapers or pay for electronic subscriptions that give them access to the full content. Those who read what has been made accessible to them through complex production and distribution processes do not usually object to paying for reading.

Turning to freely accessible news channels, which are often subsidized by advertizing or political groups, is often associated with a risk of unreliability and doubt. The parallel that can be drawn between this schematic type of situation and publication of scientific data is obvious.

The founding members of the International CCN Society were among the very first ones to support the idea of providing scientists with open access to new information that should be available to everyone in order to stimulate scientific fields to progress.

After we created the first Cell Communication and Signaling open access journal, we feared that the economical system that was run by BMC, was, in a way, scientifically counterproductive as it required that authors paying significant fees for submission could get appropriate funding.

Back in the pre-internet era, many of us willing to publish in leader journals had to devote a quite substantial amount of their grant for publication matters.

As was previously documented, this was the major reason for dropping CCS to create the Journal of Cell Communication and Signaling with Springer (see Perbal B 2015).

The profusion of open access journals that have blossomed over the past decade was accompanied by the unfortunate proliferation of predatory journals and publication of a very large number of manuscripts that reported falsified data and needed to be retracted.

These malpractices have had a profound impact on all scientific fields (see Perbal A 2017b).

On the occasion of this editorial for the new year, we all wish at JCCS to reaffirm our willingness to carefully review all manuscripts that are submitted for publication and control, as much as possible, that the data included in the published issues of JCCS are entirely reliable and can be used as a foundation for the design of new experimentation and serve as the root of scientific progress.

In our view, by helping scientific communication, we have opened our columns to authors from developing countries who have experienced financial difficulties to submit their manuscripts for publication because of the widespread erroneous idea that work from these countries is not of sufficient quality.

Again, all manuscripts published in JCCS are submitted to prior careful review under the responsibility of the editorial board and our scientific managing editor Professor Andrew Leask.

As a result of our dedication and hard work of our editorial manager Andrew Leask, and members of the editorial board, the increase in audience for JCCS appears to be very encouraging.

According to recent statistics from PubMed central, the number of downloads for 2018 increased 15% over 2017, with approximately 20 articles downloaded every hour (based on 365 days a year, and 24 h per day). These quite satisfactory figures are urging us to keep on working along the same line and to garner an even wider audience.

I would like to finish this short editorial by reminding our readers and authors working in the CCN field that the nomenclature has now been officially recognized by the HUGO committee (Perbal B et al. 2018). We do hope that this decision will help JCCS, the official organ of the ICCNS, to become the journal of choice for the publication of CCN-related studies.

With renewed very best wishes for 2019 and for JCCS.

Sincerely,

Prof. Bernard Perbal.

Editor in Chief JCCS.

President of the International CCN Society.