Carta Do Editor

Abstract

Dear readers,A hot sun and crackling blue sky herald the arrival of summer in Rio de Janeiro, spurring the exhausted workers at our journal to hedonistic thoughts of vacation, the beach, gorgeous sunsets, hammocks swinging in the warm shade and the breeze… But before we can indulge ourselves in this well-deserved rest, the world just might come to an end, if we are to judge by the frenzied buzz on the internet. Many people believe December 21, 2012 will be doomsday, as supposedly predicted by the Mayan calendar. To be on the safe side -given that emotions are running high in the Mideast and that Antarctica and Greenland are thawing faster than we'd imagined -we hurried up to close this year's special supplement, about health and slavery, and brought the journal's editors together for an evaluation and outlook session.Suggestions were raised for various topics that might be addressed in dossiers or supplements in the near future (if there is one): the history of sports -leveraging the major events set to take place in Brazil starting in 2013 (the FIFA Confederations Cup, the World Cup, the Olympics, and so on); the 25 th anniversary of Brazil's Unified Health System; the centennial of the death of Alfred Russel Wallace; the history of informatics; and the history of military medicine, already a fertile branch of historiography in other countries and gaining ground here as well. We talked about the journal joining social networks, an exciting topic that I'll leave for another editor's note. The terms of office for the current members of our editorial board are coming to an end, and the new board will be shaped to provide us support in the various fields of knowledge with which we interact and to strengthen the journal both regionally and internationally. We will persist in our goals of encouraging more submissions from all corners of Brazil and of increasing the journal's presence abroad in terms of citations, consequently enhancing its performance on international indexes. With this in mind, we believe we will see promising rewards from our heavy investment in the English translation of articles for our online edition at Portal SciELO -Scientific Electronic Library Online (www.scielo.br/hcsm). From 2006 through Volume 19, Number 3 (Jul.-Sep. 2012), 108 articles were translated from Portuguese or Spanish into the language of Shakespeare -or, more in keeping with our vocation, of Ross and Manson. We decided to look for ways to share a fraction of the financial burden of translation with our authors, starting in 2013, and to cut back on the printing of hard copies. We also discussed the efforts we've been making to shorten the overly long time our contributors generally wait to see their articles published as well as about our steadily growing number of submissions, which forces us to increase our rejection rate. Our more personal exchanges with authors and peer reviewers, which have set the tone here at our journal, will suffer changes in the near future, as our inevitable adoption of an online submission system wi...