Internationality

In May 2001 we opened an office of the British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology in Australasia. All submissions of original material from Japan and Australasia are handled by our Australasian Editor, Professor Evan Begg, and we are pleased to report that the number of articles submitted to the Journal from Australasia and the Far East has increased by about one-third in the last 3 years. This month we open a new office in North America and welcome our North American Editor, Professor Lionel Lewis from Dartmouth College, Lebanon, New Hampshire. All future submissions of original material from the Americas, which should be submitted through Manuscript Central, will be allocated to Professor Lewis, who will in turn assign each paper to a member of the Journal’s Executive Editorial Board in the usual way. The papers in this month's Journal show just how international the Journal has become. There are 17 papers from 93 authors in 41 institutions in 15 countries: the USA and Canada (4 papers), Australia and New Zealand (2 papers), Japan (2 papers), and one each from China, India, and eight European countries (Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the UK). Four of the five papers from UK institutions are collaborations with authors in other countries; amusingly, the only paper that comes solely from the UK is a study of worldwide national differences in publishing papers on adverse drug reactions. The proceedings of the Dutch Society for Clinical Pharmacology and Biopharmacy round off our world tour. The two maps on pages 3 and 4 show how things have changed over the last 30 years. The first map shows the provenance of 134 papers that appeared in the first 12 issues, published in 1974–5 (from 206 institutions, two co-written by authors from more than one country); the second map shows the provenance of 160 papers in the 12 issues published in 2004 (from 370 institutions, 36 co-written by authors from more than one country). In order to encourage submissions from the still relatively blank parts of the map we are now starting to extend the composition of the Executive and International Editorial Boards, to include South America, Africa, and the Middle East. Some of the new names that will appear on page ii of subsequent issues will reflect this. Journals like to publish international papers, and authors like to publish internationally. In this month's issue we publish a paper from Spain on the effect of CYP2C8 polymorphism on the disposition of (R)-ibuprofen. When the paper had already appeared in the on-line version, we noticed that similar work from the same group had just appeared in Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics. The two references are as follows: Martínez et al. The effect of the cytochrome P450 CYP2C8 polymorphism on the disposition of (R)-ibuprofen enantiomer in healthy subjects. BJCP On-line, doi 10.1111/j.1365-2125.2004.02183.x (this issue, pp. 62–8). García-Martín et al. Interindividual variability in ibuprofen pharmacokinetics is related to interaction of cytochrome P450 2C8 and 2C9 amino acid polymorphisms. CPT 2004; 76: 119-27, doi 10.1016/j.clpt. 2004.04.006. The two papers were submitted within a week of each other (CPT 5 February and BJCP 12 February) and were accepted within a similar time (CPT 16 April and BJCP 5 April). Neither paper made reference to the other, and we wondered about the provenance of the data. The senior author has reassured us that the studies were carried out on completely different subjects, and we are therefore happy to publish the paper in this issue and, for the avoidance of any doubt, to include his reassurance. Had the authors sent each journal a copy of the paper that they were submitting simultaneously to the other journal, with a full explanation of what they had done, our question would not have arisen. Authors who find themselves in this position would be wise to be transparent about their intentions. Some readers may not have previously seen the type of map that we have used to display the data shown on the next two pages. The earth is an oblate spheroid, and the problem of projecting it on to a two-dimensional surface is one that has long tormented geographers. The most famous of many projections is that of Mercator, which was first published by Gerhard Kremer (Gerhardus Mercator), a Flemish cartographer (1512–94), in around 1569. Mercator's projection shows the correct shapes of the land masses. However, it distorts their relative sizes, those nearer the poles being exaggerated in size, so that, for example, Greenland looks much larger than it really is. This is because on a sphere parallel lines converge at the poles, getting closer as you go further north or south, whereas on a flat representation they stay at the same distance from each other. Thus, the flat representation gets more stretched out the nearer you get to the poles. For a mathematical account of the Mercator projection see http://mathworld.wolfram.com/MercatorProjection.html. The Peters Projection World Map (http://www.petersmap.com) was first introduced by Dr. Arno Peters at a Press Conference in Germany in 1974, and the first English version was published in 1983. The Peters projection shows the relative sizes of the landmasses accurately, and in order to do so sacrifices the depiction of shape. However, it retains the parallelism of the lines of latitude and longitude. For a mathematical account of this and other projections see http://mathworld.wolfram.com/PetersProjection.html.

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