It was a pleasant surprise this month when we learned of the latest impact factor of JCCS was 5.782. Leaving aside the obvious issues of relying on a simple metric to determine issues of journal, article and research quality, it is extremely gratifying that a journal initially founded with the purposes of being the primary method of communication of the International CCN Society (ICCNS) has grown to be a journal that has a wide readership (Perbal 2020). One of the first decisions we made as an editorial board was to open up our journal to be a major source of articles published by authors based in non-traditional scientific countries. Indeed, recently we have published articles from not only India and China, but also countries such as Turkey, Iran and Ghana (Masoumi-Dehghi et al. 2020; Mokhlesi and Talkhabi 2020; Berkel and Cacan 2021; Fordjour et al. 2021). That we are able to have such an excellent impact factor reflects the high quality of science in non-traditional scientific countries, which we are pleased to present in our journal. It is the team of authors, Editorial Board members and reviewers (along with the staff at Springer Nature!) that has made this impact factor possible.

On a related note: the recent success in developing the extremely successful BioNTech/Pfizer mRNA COVID vaccine was due to Turkish immigrants in Germany. This breakthrough would not have been accomplished without a long-standing basic research program that could be successfully mobilized, with the appropriate investment, and collaborative teamwork among several sectors.