The last issue of the year, a retrospective and a new perspective for the Revista Brasileira de Hematologia e Hemoterapia.

With this issue, the last in volume 35, the Revista Brasileira de Hematologia e Hemoterapia (RBHH) concludes fourteen years of publication. The RBHH succeeds the Boletim da Sociedade Brasileira de Hematologia e Hemoterapia (Bol SBHH) which started in 1973 and published 179 issues in 20 volumes.

The journal has experienced an evolution involving many changes throughout its history, and today it is an internationally recognized journal in its field.

The first major change occurred in 1999, when the directors under the chairmanship of Celso Carlos de Campos Guerra foresaw the future and the need for the Boletim to progress from being 'the journal of the SBHH' to being 'the journal of Brazilian hematology'. A decision was taken to change the title and format to what it is now, the RBHH as, at that time there was not only the Sociedade Brasileira de Hematologia e Hemoterapia (SBHH) but also the Colégio Brasileira de Hematologia (CBH)(. This was the first step of the journal in becoming a link between the two institutions. The history of the Bol SBHH was documented in the first issue of the 'new' RBHH(.

In the 1990s, after advances in electronic publication and the internet, the first electronic journal, Psycoloquy, was launched by Stevan Harnard. This was soon after followed by the journal 'The Public Access Computer System Review'. Another milestone was the proposal to establish the first Web server as documented in an article by Tim Berners-Lee, the famous 'World Wide Web: Proposal for the Hyper Text Project', which illustrated and projected the future of communications and of scientific journals. They would no longer be the same(. In 1997 PubMed was launched and incorporated into open access Medline. The project to establish the Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO) in Brazil also began in 1997 with it going online in 1998(.

Until 2001 the RBHH was published every four months, and already counted on the participation of the Sociedade Brasileira de Transplante de Medula Óssea (. A request at this time was made for the inclusion of the journal in SciELO which had encompassed few journals in its pilot project. In October of that year, the Journal Appraisal Committee of SciELO accepted the RBHH on one condition that the journal would be published every three months which started in the following year(. In 2005, the Associação Italo-Brasileira de Hematologia (AIBE), recently-founded in the city of Genoa, Italy, became affiliated to the RBHH. In 2006, in its eighth year of circulation, an evaluation of the journal was published that showed an increase in the number of submissions and publications with a significant increase in the percentage of scientific works coming from outside the States of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro that had, until then, been the major contributors(. It was concluded at the time, that the journal was well-known throughout Brazil. In 2008 the RBHH started to be published every two months as a result of the increased number of submissions and online submission was implanted using the Publications Management System of GN1.

The Associação Brasileira de Hematologia e Hemoterapia (ABHH) was founded with the merger of the SBHH and the CBH; at this time the directors decided to invest in the internationalization of the journal. A support secretariat was set up to edit the journal, communication professionals were hired and an Internal Editorial Committee was organized with the aim of refining the material approved for publication. Moreover, the editorial board was restructured by inviting several international experts in the field and the number of internal and external reviewers in Brazil and abroad was increased. A new editorial policy created new sections such as Scientific Comments and removed old ones, such as the Thesis Abstract section. In 2011 the journal began to be printed just in English(, a heresy for many, but a general trend in the scientific world with the essentiality of greater international visibility and under oppression due to the impact factor of ISI/JCR/Thomson Reuters(. This was discussed at depth and mentioned in various journals including in the RBHH after the most recent Qualis classification by Capes. Changes in the Qualis classification forced journals to buckle down on improving their quality to overcome the challenge of internationalization. From 2011, two Internal Editorial Committee members started to evaluate articles with careful inspection of the statistics and the standard of English by a native English language assistant editor as well as at least two peer-reviewers, experts on the topic. The choice of reviewers ranged from suggestions by the authors themselves to indications by associate editors who started to give their opinions or even directly interfere in the review process as they saw necessary. After approval of the scientific content, authors received notification of a possible need for further revision and adaptation to the format accepted by the journal and occasionally they even needed to provide additional data on the topic under evaluation. The entire process is monitored by the Editor in Chief of the RBHH with evaluations using a double blind system. The results of this are seen in the rejection rate which over this current year increased to 64% of the submitted articles (Figure 1).

Figure 1

Rejection rate, contribution of foreign authors and submissions – 2008-2013

Another important fact in 2012 is that the journal started to receive a valuable contribution from the Sociedade Brasileira de Oncologia Pediátrica (SOBOPE); with this society, the RBHH became the official voice of four Brazilian medical associations.

More recently there has been a significant increase in contributions from foreign scientists because the journal started to be published in English, the lingua franca of science, and because of the editorial policy of inviting internationally renowned experts to complement or criticize articles being published or that have already been published in the RBHH (Figure 1). Table 1 shows the increase in the number of editions of the RBHH over the years.

Table 1

The scientific production of the Revista Brasileira de Hematologia e Hemoterapia from 2000 to 2013 in the Scientific Electronic Library Online database

Year	Vol.	Number
2013	35	1	2	3	4	5
2012	34	1	2	3	4	5	6
2011	33	1	2	3	4	5	6
2010	32	1	2	3	4	5	6	suppl. 1	suppl. 2
2009	31	1	2	3	4	5	6	suppl. 1	suppl. 2
2008	30	1	2	3	4	5	6	suppl. 1	suppl. 2
2007	29	1	2	3	4
2006	28	1	2	3	4
2005	27	1	2	3	4
2004	26	1	2	3	4
2003	25	1	2	3	4
2002	24	1	2	3	4
2001	23	1	2	3
2000	22	1	2	3

From the May-June issue of 2011, the articles of the RBHH began to be available in one of the two most important databases of the world, PubMed and available online as open access in PubMed Central.

From 2014, more challenges are awaiting the RBHH; it will be published by Elsevier with the goal of increasing the journal's visibility with its insertion in Science Direct, restructuring its evaluation system and again increasing the scientific content.