All of us appreciate the sense of satisfaction and achievement that accompanies a successful enterprise. The HSS Journal has prospered from the hard work and creativity of our editorial board as well as from contributions from a wide representation of the HSS community. The HSS Journal has evolved from a homespun in-house publication to a well-recognized and worthy forum for publication of musculoskeletal science. The HSS Journal is now widely read: each issue is mailed to over 18,000 recipients worldwide, and downloads of online articles have grown to almost 20,000.

The future growth of the Journal will require that we continue to attract worthy manuscripts from the international community. Authors are attracted to prestigious journals with the hope that their work will be widely read and quoted (cited) in articles from their peers. Citation rates are measured by the Impact Factor, which is often viewed as the best indicator of a journal’s prestige. The Impact Factor, which is published in the Journal Citation Report each year by Thomson Reuters, is an average of the number of citations in the current year of articles published in the prior 2 years [1]. It goes without saying that, in order for an article to be cited, it must first be found amidst the ever-increasing number of published articles. Discoverability is a key to the ultimate success of a journal.

Indexing and abstracting services facilitate the broadest discoverability and dissemination of a journal’s content by pointing researchers to articles that are relevant to their field. For medical journals, PubMed, which represents the National Library of Medicine, is the primary indexing services. It is not an easy task for a journal to be judged worthy of indexing by these services, and in fact, only a small fraction of the journals that apply for indexing each year are accepted. The decision to include a journal is based on several factors, the most important of which is a strong record of high-quality content with many more worthy manuscripts in the pipeline.

The editorial board of the HSS Journal has set as a goal the achievement of full indexing by the end of 2013. We believe we have a great deal in our favor. The quantity and quality of submitted manuscripts have grown so much that we now can support three issues per year. We continue to benefit from the incredibly generous support of our benefactors that contribute through participation in our Fall Benefit. This financial support allows us to expand our reach and to continue to publish well-illustrated and appealing issues. We have also used this support to solicit content from international meetings that might otherwise go unreported.

We hope authors will increasingly view us as a great place to publish their work. We are interested in any manuscripts concerned with Musculoskeletal Medicine and Science. Some of the advantages offered by the HSS Journal include its very large, worldwide readership, a user-friendly editorial process, rapid decision and online publication, the opportunity for Open Access publication, and publication by Springer, one of the largest medical publishers in the world.