In the recent past, especially under the direction of Antonio Morais, Pulmonology, formerly the Portuguese Pulmonology Journal, has achieved substantial progress in terms of editorial standards and impact factor. In addition to these, new objectives have been targeted, such as reduction in proximity between editors and authors, increase in recruiting new reviewers, and a more international appeal, among others.1 With these objectives in mind the Sociedade Portuguesa de Pneumologia (SPP) decided to build a more international Editorial Board with an Editor in Chief from abroad. I have accepted this stimulating, but very challenging task, and thank the SPP for this great honor and the opportunity of serving this emerging journal and this prestigious Scientific Society.

Despite coming from abroad I don’t consider myself as an Italian player in Portugal while Cristiano Ronaldo plays in Italy…. “si parva licet componere magnis”.2 We are all European and in an age when Europe is again facing fences between countries, the message from SPP is remarkable: science is one of few ways of overcoming old and useless divisions.

Unfortunately in these times science is also questioned (look at no-vax): therefore the main task of a journal like Pulmonology must be to fly high the flag of science maintaining and possibly increasing the scientific level of the published articles (the impact factor is just one aspect of that), either original or review papers. Another, not less important, task is maintaining the respect for authors, reducing the first response time, with reviews and comments which are not only useful to the Editorial Board in the decision process, but also and more importantly, helping authors to improve their work. Hopefully the publisher will help to reduce the time from acceptance to on line and final publishing. Finally as the official journal of the SPP, Pulmonology should increase its educational mission by publishing, when possible, guidelines, statements, solicited reviews and state of the art reports.

It will be not easy, but we are sure that the authors, the old and new members of the Editorial Board, the reviewers, the publisher and last but not least, the SPP will face these demanding tasks and will contribute to the development of Pulmonology.

Good luck and good work