Farewell and Welcome Journal of Sleep Research

Dear friends and colleagues,
members of the ESRS and readers of JSR,

Many of you know that my tenureship as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Sleep Research expired at the end of 2025, after a very fruitful working period of nine years.
On the occasion of my retirement from JSR, please allow me to address you with a few words:

I was ready to take over Editorship from Derk-Jan Dijk in summer 2016, who had steered JSR for 6 years in a very successful manner. I was aware of the big footsteps I had to step in and also a bit anxious to live up to the expectations of our readers, all our editors and the then board of the ESRS. It turned out I need not worry so much as I had the help of Brigitte Knobl, our editorial manager. Work with her always was very swift, to the point and characterised by mutual understanding and friendship. Brigitte retired in July 2025 and I do wish her all the best for her retirement. Johanna Ell has smoothly taken over from Brigitte and will guarantee that JSR will also be very successful in the future.

Through my editorship with JSR I was propelled into the larger world of publishing in sleep research and sleep medicine: what a wonderful, diverse and challenging world that is! Probably more than 7000 manuscripts went “over my table”, i.e. were viewed by me on my computer from 2017 – 2025. JSR now faces a steady increase in submissions from 460 in 2017 to around 1800 in 2025. When we first noticed this trend a few years ago we did interpret this very positively, assuming that this trend is due to a heightened attractiveness of authors in the sleep field. As of today, my view of this is more realistic and sometimes even negative. Scrutinising the submissions it turns out that not the quality of submissions per se but the quantity of submissions has drastically increased (“paper mills”), coupled with a far higher rejection rate of manuscripts in order to keep our scientific standards intact. This was accompanied by an increase of Deputy and Associate Editors, because the workload increased so much. The same applies to our reviewers, and I fully understand that frequently our requests for reviewing are turned down or not even answered. What a calm and relaxed world scientific publishing was when I entered the field myself around 40 years ago. I remember fondly how keen I was to review other papers at that time and I always tried to be fair and on time. Given the flood of manuscripts probably most scientific journals are faced now, it is highly likely that the reviewer problem will further increase.

However, no need for becoming nostalgic: Many things have improved very much in the last decades – we do handle manuscripts much more swiftly now. Feedback to authors is quicker and it always been my aim to keep authors not too long in the wait. My editorial team and I were always keen on including a balanced selection of topics from sleep research and sleep medicine and I hope that we managed to do so.

At this point, I want to thank all the authors, reviewers and members of the editorial board of JSR – it was such a pleasure to work with all of you and the experience of being part of a dynamic scientific community has carried me through the nine years of editorship.

I also want to thank the several acting boards of the ESRS during this time for their support. JSR is the journal of the ESRS and as such our society´s flagship. I sincerely hope that I have been able to carry the “torch” for the last nine years in a very visible fashion for our field and the society.

I am very glad that the board of the ESRS selected Prof. Hans-Peter Landolt as my successor. Johanna Ell already took over the position of editorial assistant from Brigitte Knobl.  Hans-Peter Landolt not only will simply continue my work but he does have plenty of ideas to rejuvenate the journal. I do sincerely wish Hans-Peter and Johanna the best of luck for the future.

Now it is time for me to say goodbye to all of you in my function as Editor-in -Chief of JSR – it is worth staying with the ESRS and JSR! Be assured: this is only a partial goodbye as I will stay active in sleep research and sleep medicine for a few more years to come – I am looking forward to meeting all of you in Mastricht this year!

All the Best!

Dieter Riemann, Ph.D., Professor of Clinical Psychophysiology
Speaker of the Board of the German Sleep Society
Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy
Medical Center, University of Freiburg, Faculty of Medicine
University of Freiburg, Germany