Abstract
As we come up to the end of 2025, we can reflect on what has been a busy, yet successful, year for Shoulder & Elbow.
The journal has gone from strength to strength, and this year is on track to reach over 300 submissions from about 30 countries worldwide. Dealing with this large workload would be impossible but for the commitment of all our Associate Editors and their assigned reviewers, to whom we are immensely grateful. Our thanks also to Associate Editors who have left the journal, and a warm welcome to new ones joining us. We look forward to appointing more Associate Editors over the next few months to ease the workload, and with them, hopefully, more reviewers will be encouraged to do this vital work.
In June of this year, Ro Kulkarni, as Chairman of the Steering Committee, signed a renewed contract with the publishers, SAGE, after some months of negotiation. The important positives for the readership and submitting authors are that we now have an expanded page budget per issue. Since summer, this has allowed us to start clearing our current backlog of articles, and going forward will mean that the time from submission and acceptance to publication in an issue will significantly reduce, although accepted submissions will continue to be placed on the journal's OnLine First platform on the website and assigned a DOI within weeks of acceptance.
As we move forward over the next few years, we would encourage other national shoulder and elbow societies to consider affiliation with Shoulder & Elbow. We would welcome the opportunity to increase the international representation at the Editorial Board and Associate Editor level that comes with affiliation and to take advantage of other benefits that we believe would be beneficial to their members. We and our publishers would welcome the opportunity to discuss these benefits with individual societies considering this.
The journal also owes a debt of gratitude to all who give their time and effort, including the Editorial Board, Steering Committee and BESS Council. A special thanks to Stella, our editorial assistant, who continues to work tirelessly to help all those involved in running the journal, as well as offering advice and answering all the questions posed by authors.
This issue contains an obituary to Michael Watson, one of the founding members of BESS, who sadly died on 31 October 2024. We decided that this should be written after Michael was honoured at the BESS annual scientific meeting in Brighton in June 2025. This obituary has therefore been written by Ian Bayley and Angus Wallace following their tribute paid at that meeting. Angela, Michael's wife, has also contributed some personal insight into her husband, who was much more than just a shoulder surgeon and a founding member of BESS! We hope you will find this article enlightening and a valuable addition to those already written by other societies.
Finally, we wish you and your families a peaceful festive season to rest and energise in preparedness to tackle what we hope will be an even more successful 2026.