Thank you for the privilege

Keywords: authors, Editors-in-Chief, Journal, publishing, Sexual Health.

As Roy and I relinquish our positions as Editors-in-Chief of Sexual Health, we would like to extend our best wishes to Jason Ong and Joe Tucker who will be taking over from us. We are pleased that the journal will be in such strong and capable hands and are sure that it has a great future ahead of it. We leave with a great sense of pride and also gratitude to all those at CSIRO Publishing who have supported us in our role, including but not limited to; Brietta Pike, Philippa Tolmie, and Danielle Zigomanis. We are extremely grateful for our talented and hardworking team of current¹ and past joint editors but above all to our authors who are the key to the success of any journal.

Sexual Health began 20 years ago, in 2003 when a group of enthusiastic and dedicated Melbournians met in the board room of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) in Collingwood to discuss possibly starting a new journal with an Asia Pacific focus.² The United Kingdom had the journal Sexually Transmitted Infections since 1925 and the United States had Sexually Transmitted Diseases since 1974; and so, we thought it was time the Asia Pacific region had one too. And so it was, on that day that Sexual Health was born and published its first issue in 2004. A special thank you to all those at that meeting in 2003 whose enthusiasm created the necessary momentum for Sexual Health including Andrew Stammer and Richard Hecker from CSIRO and my fellow researchers Roger Short, Suzanne Crowe, Marian Pitts, Darren Russell, Anthony Smith and Suzanne Garland (my apologies for anyone I missed – it was a while ago!). Thank you also to the team at CSIRO over the years including Lalina Muir and Jenny Foster. And thank you to the founding joint editors who worked tirelessly in those early days, which were challenging (David Cooper, Verapol Chanderying, Suzanne Crowe, Andrew Grulich, Man-Lun Ng, N. Kumarasamy, Suzanne Garland, Marian Pitts and Roy Chan).

We were lucky to have played our part in the success of Sexual Health. We were in the right place at the right time; academic sexual health in the Asia Pacific region was growing and research institutions, such as the now Kirby Institute and Burnet Institute, were increasingly working in sexually transmitted infections rather than just HIV. This is not to downplay how difficult it was at the beginning. It was hard contacting as many presenters as possible at conferences after their presentations and pleading for them to submit papers or writing untold numbers of unsolicited personal emails to attract papers to a journal that was not on Medline and had no impact factor. Thank you for your early support!

Thank you to the fabulous team of joint editors now and over the past 20 years whose role it was to find reviewers and assess whether the papers could be improved sufficiently to be published. This is hard but important work that is becoming more difficult with the proliferation of predatory journals in recent years.³ Some joint editors have stuck by us for most (Marian Pitts) or all that time (Andrew Grulich) warrant a special thanks from us.

Sexual Health was not the first journal for this discipline in Australia. We were lucky that Venerology had paved the way for us. Venereology was launched by the late Peter Meese and Ian Denham at the World IUSTI Meeting in Melbourne, in 1988. Juliet Richters and Basil Donovan were subsequent editors. At that time the journal was not able to get the support of a publishing house like CSIRO to take it on-line and so closed shortly after.

Thank you to everyone for what has been an extraordinary privilege; the authors for trusting us with their work, the joint editors for the hours of work late at night working to improve the papers and to the CSIRO team who have made our job so much easier. And best of luck to Jason and Joe.

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.