Stepping ahead

Only a few months have passed since the launch issue of CTT, and the feedback from authors, reviewers, and readers has been a rewarding experience.

Apart from current articles and reviews on an interesting range of topics, this issue contains a special section on mesenchymal cell therapy, with 7 articles out of 15 dedicated to this topic.

In the same section, in addition to the MSC articles, Mariusz Z. Ratajczak et al. introduce the very small embryonic-like stem cells (VSEL) and their potential for the regeneration of tissues.

From a related field, we publish „In and out of mitosis“, Tim Hunt‘s Special Lecture given at the Wilsede Meeting 2008. This is published jointly with our sister portal www.wilsede-science-connections.com, whose multimedia resources we are starting to make available to a wider audience.

We particularly wish to encourage young medical researchers to get their cutting edge work peer-reviewed and published in CTT. From this issue onwards, the Contents page will include an icon called „FirstIA“ to highlight the authors for whom this CTT article is their first international article.

We would like to thank the following colleagues for undertaking the peer reviews for this issue of CTT: Ulrike Bacher, Alexey B. Chukhlovin, Boris Fehse, Nikolay N. Klimko, Nicolaus Kröger, Claudia Lange, Katarina Le Blanc, Nikolai N. Mamaev, and Ludmila S. Zubarovskaya.

Boris Vladimirovich Afanasyev and Axel Rolf Zander

Your Managing editor speaking

Since CTT is an open access journal, readers as well as authors can benefit enormously. How do authors benefit? You can link directly from your publication lists on the web to your CTT article. Your reader can click on a link that makes the article accessible immediately and without any cost barriers. This means that any web reader anywhere has access to your article and, without any extra effort, can cite your CTT article in their work.

CTT articles are already being indexed in CAS and DOAJ, with more visibility measures to come.

It is a great pleasure for me to run this journal on the managerial and production side together with our Editorial Office team located in both Hamburg and St. Petersburg. Our production team, too, is a meeting point for different lines of thought and it is an exceptional experience to develop a scientific journal together in managerial and technological respects.

I wish to thank the following colleagues for helping us start off so well: bitfarmers.com (with Michael Hirdes, Gina Steiner and Michael Sendke), René Hornung, Liudmila Lashkouskaya, Viktoriya Levenko, Yana Onikiychuk, Melissa Pritchard, Jutta Roebers, Anna Starikova, and Oksana Zhebel.

If you as authors and/or readers wish to contribute any questions, suggestions or comments, these are highly appreciated. Feel free to contact me directly, thank you.

Claudia Koltzenburg
managingeditor@ctt-journal.com