{"doi":"10.1002/epi4.13010","title":"Reflections on the first 8 years of <i>Epilepsia Open</i>","abstract":"On September 1, 2024, I will be completing my 8-year term as Editor-in-Chief of Epilepsia Open and will be handing over its leadership to the new Editor-in-Chief Merab Kokaia. It has been a privilege serving at its helms since 2016, the year when Epilepsia Open was created, alongside Dieter Schmidt, Gary Mathern, and Xuefeng Wang initially and Dong Zhou since 2018, as well as an esteemed group of associate editors who were instrumental in establishing this newly formed open access journal of the ILAE, Epilepsia Open, as one of the top epilepsy journals. Epilepsia Open was created in 2016 to absorb the meritorious epilepsy research manuscripts that would not be published in the existing ILAE journals as well as provide a fully open access publishing platform responding to the growing calls for transparency and public access of funded research.1 In parallel, in epilepsy, there was an international movement to improve infrastructure and research practices so as to improve translation of preclinical research findings. Epilepsia Open became a suitable publishing platform to accomplish this, implementing policies that promoted transparency and rigorous scientific reporting, and minimized publishing bias by considering negative, confirmatory studies, and preliminary reports,2 as long as they have scientific and translational merit and importance. The journal also became a common platform for publishing International League Against Epilepsy (ILAE) reports particularly the reports of the ILAE/American Epilepsy Society (AES) Joint Translational Task Force, such as on preclinical models and rodent electrophysiological studies.3-12 Importantly, Epilepsia Open attracted articles on global health as well as reports of research collaboratives and consumer-led funding organizations reporting on research initiatives and progress or consensus statements on topics relevant to specialized areas of epilepsy research. We further instituted article formats that would enable multicenter collaborative studies to publish their design and data as a package of single-site short article reports and an overall across-sites synthesis of findings, providing more insights into site-specific versus across-site findings as well as opportunities for crediting the work of key collaborators who would otherwise be diluted among multi-author publications.13 Submissions to Epilepsia Open transformed through the years to a more author-friendly free format, to make it easier for the authors to obtain feedback on whether their work is publishable in our journal, before committing to our preferred manuscript format. Realizing that this is an ILAE journal with a responsibility to address the diversity in sociopolitical, language, cultural, and training background of the authors, our editors have been addressing such issues with sensitivity often working with the authors to achieve a quality level that is suitable for our journal. In 2018, we initiated the Epilepsia Open annual prizes to reward the best basic science and clinical original research published in the journal the year prior by young investigators. Being a fully open-access journal carries a heavy responsibility in improving the clarity of published content, especially in a field where specialized terms and expressions may challenge the understanding of research advances by nonspecialists and the broader community, which looks upon scientific publications for the promise of new therapies, tools, and scientific insights that could transform the lives of those affected with seizures or epilepsies. To address this, a lived experience editorial position was initiated to advise and work with us in making the journal more relevant in these aspects. Some of the format changes have already been instituted, such as the plain summary, graphical abstract, and our inaugural lived experience editor, Action Amos, has been instrumental in providing input and developing new strategies to serve this goal. In an effort to bring ","journal":"Epilepsia Open","year":2024,"id":501673,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":0,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9523,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2024-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":261700,"name":"Aristea S. Galanopoulou","orcid":"0000-0002-0472-2903","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":13,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T02:10:15.999370Z","pmid":"39082223","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}