On July 31, 2022, the International Journal of Infectious Diseases (IJID) bid farewell to Professor Eskild Petersen, after his decade as its Editor-in-Chief. Professor Petersen has guided IJID through transition to full open access publishing in 2013, and in the last two years, steered the journal through the “stormy” period of the COVID-19 pandemic. One notable impact of the pandemic was the unprecedented increase of journal publications in all scientific subjects especially in infectious diseases (Else, 2020). Between 2020 and mid-2022, over a million articles on COVID-19 have been published internationally (https://reports.dimensions.ai/covid-19). For IJID it has meant a three-fold increase in submissions compared to before the pandemic. It has been extremely challenging to sift through the huge number of submissions to select high quality publications on COVID-19 for the assimilation of readers amid the pandemic. This has gone on smoothly at IJID, which has continued its role for disseminating new knowledge relating to and arising from the pandemic especially among under-resourced countries.

During the pandemic, young academics from the ISID (International Society for Infectious Diseases) Emerging Leaders program were brought into the editorial team to facilitate capacity-building and international networking in the infectious diseases field. The pandemic also witnessed the launch of IJID Regions, a sister journal for enhancing the visibility of regional infectious diseases research especially from under-resourced settings (Lee et al., 2021). IJID's impact factor has gone up from 2.35 in 2012 to 12.07 in 2021 and is now ranked within the first quartile of Infectious Diseases journals.

We wish Professor Petersen well in his future endeavors and thank him for all he has done for the Society.

Read the IJID Editorial on Eskild Petersen here.