A New Issue of JDEP: Contents, Progress, and Challenges

Welcome to the second issue of 2025. The current issue has the usual features, including four original articles, and the Gulf Association of Endocrinology and Diabetes (GAED) Clinical Congress of 2024 abstracts. We have exceeded the number of pages per issue to assign more articles fairly early and to accommodate the GAED conference abstracts.

The four original research articles were a mixture of clinical and basic studies. Sameen Abbas and colleagues from Pakistan reported a comparative evaluation of the usability and preference of insulin syringes and prefilled pens among diabetes patients. The MENA Endocrine Research Group shared one of its surveys addressing the Graves' ophthalmopathy management and selenium use in thyroid disease by surveying physicians from the Middle East and Africa. The fourth original study was a pilot study on the behavior change counseling strategies as an effective treatment approach along with insulin regimens for type 1 young adult diabetes patients from a busy diabetic clinic; a randomized single-blinded controlled trial by Shiju Raman Unni and colleagues.

Finally, the free communications of the GAED Clinical Congress, held on October 18 to 20, 2024, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, are included under the conference abstracts category.

Back to the editorial's theme, the journal's progress is steady but slower than expected after so many years of hard work. Despite the regular, timely release of all issues, the volume is too low. This is particularly obvious in the number of original articles. The GAED and the editorial board are highly committed to supporting the journal as an open-access sponsored journal with free access to authors and readers. However, the journal still lacks indexation in the popular databases such as PubMed and Scopus, chasing regional authors away despite the Diamond-Open access model. Another major challenge is the reluctance of regional peer reviewers to offer their services. Although this is a global problem, it is particularly obvious in emerging journals, leading to marked delays in making editorial decisions. Although we are proudly committed to the principles of scholarly publishing with peer reviewing as its cornerstone, some authors get annoyed by such delay. We maintain a good professional relationship with our publisher (Thieme) in the day-to-day running of the journal. However, they seem to be overwhelmed with other journals when it comes to making indexing applications. Early in 2025, we were promised that the process would speed up, and we hope to see some results.

Author's Contribution

Single author.

Compliance with Ethical Principles

None.

Publication History

Article published online:
19 May 2025