The December issue is a good time to reflect on the past year’s achievements and to look forward to the New Year: 2004 was a bumper year for Gut with over 1900 manuscripts submitted for publication. Over the last two years we have seen submissions rise by nearly a third but in spite of this we have maintained and, more recently, reduced the all important median time to first decision which is now 13 days. Most manuscripts go out to review within nine days and the average time to receive two complete reviews is 22 days. A streamlined decision process allows a final decision, on average, nine days from receipt of review. Once a manuscript is accepted, the next important date is publication, and we have worked hard to reduce this delay, which is frustrating for authors. We set ourselves a goal of reducing the time from acceptance to publication to four months. A manuscript accepted in December can expect to go to print within …