Veterinary Sciences Tomorrow celebrates its 5th birthday!
You may not have noticed, and it almost escaped also our attention: Veterinary Sciences Tomorrow celebrates its 5th birthday! When we started this electronic publishing initiative in 2000, our ambitions and expectations were high. They still are, as far as scientific profile and quality are concerned, but we have become more modest in other respects - or should I say: more realistic. When we started, it was at the time of the internet business hype, everything would become wonderful and everybody rich, and a journal could certainly profit from this trend. As the years passed, it became more and more difficult to sustain our operation financially, and we are now on a very low budget, with Anjop Venker-van Haagen and myself determining the journal's fate, both of us free-lancing, and putting in time whenever possible. We feel proud of the original concept of this journal, with it's monthly more then 30.000 visitors, and a flexibility that makes it possible to run such a state-of-the-art scientific journal on such small means. We should like to take this anniversal opportunity to thank Utrecht University for its continuous sympathy: its Library for technical aid and the Veterinary Faculty for its financial support.

When you look at the journal today, and compare its content and appeal with that in its infancy, you will notice two major changes: we now run biomedical news on a regular two-weekly basis, and we have icons to guide the reader to a discipline and an animal species. They should be as self-explanatory as the emblemic symbols at airports or train stations.

This is the time to reiterate what our objectives are. Veterinary Sciences Tomorrow - VetScite for short - is an electronic 'current awareness' journal aimed at building a global animal health research community with a sense of identity and quality. It provides biomedical news, state-of-the-art reviews and publishes interpretation and opinion on actual issues of importance for animal health, encouraging interdisciplinary exchange.

This journal is aimed at the graduate student, the PhD supervisor, the postdoctoral fellow, the academic teacher, the veterinary scholar, the science journalist, the government researcher, the scientist. This is not necessarily a vet by training - it could be any biomedical research worker in a veterinary environment. In other words: while VetScite does not want to discourage users of established knowledge, it is the forward-looking academic teaching and pathophysiology/animal well-being/veterinary public health research scene it specifically addresses. Recently, the interest of practicing veterinarians from specialist clinics has been noted, and clinical research will play an increasing role in our publication policy.

As it stands, VetScite publishes Editorials, News and Reviews (and other segments like Archives and administrative information). In its beginning, we ran four issues per year, and from 2002 onwards publication has been continuous. There is no restriction in length, since we would edit any text, to adapt it to the 'Scientific American'-like style we want to achieve. Illustrations are given special attention; we have graphic artists here that will convert a napkin sketch into an animated applet that talks! We continue to exploit the multimedia possibilities of the medium, if and when they are functional. Please look at the animated applets in www.vetscite.org.

This anniversary is an opportunity to invite you, our readers, to submit contributions you would want the veterinary scientific community to read. And to tell us how you feel about VetScite.

Sincerely,

Marian C. Horzinek and Anjop Venker-van Haagen (editors)