The new FACT

During the 6 years in which we have been editing FACT, we have received many compliments for its content. Most readers have appreciated our approach, which they see as constructively critical and scientific. Our sincere thanks for that!

Recently, we have had intensive discussions centred on the question ‘how can we improve FACT?’ On the one hand, one might feel that a good thing should not be changed; on the other hand, it would be arrogant to assume that FACT cannot be improved. We therefore decided to try and move forward and introduce several innovations, all aimed at increasing the ‘readability’ of the journal. Starting with this issue, FACT contains the following new features.

• Guest editorial. Obviously, our expertise and perspectives are limited; we thus felt that experts who are not on the editorial board should be given a voice and a ‘guest editorial’ seemed the ideal platform for this.
• Debate. Many topics in complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) are highly controversial. We want to tease out the pros and cons by publishing short features that present different or even opposing views in an academic debate.
• Additional focus articles. Many readers have told us that they particularly like our focus articles. We therefore hope to publish two such mini-reviews per issue.
• Interview. The field of CAM has no shortage of personalities who are, in one way or another, outstanding. We want to celebrate these people with very concise interviews that (hopefully) give an inspiring glimpse of a person that the reader might otherwise know only by name.
• Authors’ reply. In our Summaries and Commentaries section, the heart of FACT, we critically analyse important CAM papers. We felt that it would be only fair to invite the authors of the original papers to reply to our reviewers’ comments. We hope that this adds a further dimension to these analyses.
• Shift of emphasis. Herbal medicine has gradually become the largest section of FACT. Readers’ feedback repeatedly tells us that this topic is perceived as the most important one. We therefore feel that we should expand it. We hope to achieve this without neglecting other areas of CAM.
• Larger international editorial board. To reflect FACT’s growing North American readership we have invited 10 additional experts, mainly from North America, to contribute to the journal.

Collectively, these changes will make FACT more attractive – at least this is our hope and our motivation for introducing them. We think it is important to point out that the fundamental concept of FACT will not be altered by any of the new features. We still aim to conduct constructively critical evaluations of the recent literature with a view to providing a valuable service to our readers. Please let us know if we succeed in this.