Dear Readers,

From September onward, Cardiovasc Intervent Radiol will be guided by the new Editor-in-Chief, Klaus Hausegger from Klagenfurt. Klaus is well known to most of you. He is a gifted interventional radiologist, a prolific author, and a prominent scientist; so the editorship passes into very experienced hands. For me, it is now time to rest from the editor’s job and to relax.

An experienced colleague once told me that if you want to make new friends, being an Editor-in-Chief is the worst job to do so. This has proven quite true. Authors are usually in love with their paper; they put a lot of time and effort into it and are—of course—bitterly disappointed if the paper is not accepted. Fortunately for the editor, most suffer silently, but some express their disappointment quite frankly. An editor, however, has to make a choice among hundreds of brilliant ideas, discussions, and proposals and cannot accept more than roughly a fifth of them. Decisions are based on a variety of perspectives, reviews, and topics. In the vast majority, these are fair and balanced but sometimes reviewers and/or editors can be mistaken in their decisions. Therefore, I want to apologize to any authors who may have suffered from my decisions, and ask for your understanding.

CVIR will have existed for 40 years next year, as the longest running journal dedicated to IR. It was my privilege to guide it through more than a third of its existence. Altogether, we have seen it grow and flourish, climbing up in ranking lists and impact factors, and in readers, downloads, and citations.

I want to take the chance to say “thank you” to a large group of people: To you—the readers and authors—and my fellow editors from almost all regions of the world; the section editors; the CIRSE and Springer staff from Vienna, New York and Heidelberg; and our editorial board members for all the support they have given to me over all these years.

One person, however, deserves a very special thanks, and this is our Managing Editor, Deana Rodriguez. For 14 years, Deana and I had a truly day-and-night—but strictly online—relationship, all while being thousands of miles apart. Deana was awake when I was sleeping and vice versa. Nevertheless, this 24/7 coverage was most helpful to effectively steer this journal.

Deana is an outstanding managing editor: precise and meticulous, caring and innovative, always available and always friendly. She was the perfect partner to fulfill my job for more than a decade. People like Deana are the soul of an editorial workload, and her skills are indispensable for success.

I wish Klaus and the new editorial team all the best, and I am absolutely sure that CVIR will continue to further flourish in its role as the flagship journal of CIRSE and an international platform for IR publications.

D. Vorwerk

Editor-in-Chief, CVIR