Ageing & Society was established in 1981 by several luminaries of British gerontology with multiple affiliations to the British Society of Gerontology, the Centre for Policy on Ageing and Cambridge University Press. Ever since, the editorial team and the Editorial Board have been strongly associated with the BSG. The journal is now among the top three international journals in social gerontology, and even in competition with clinical geriatrics journals, ranks 11th on citation impact factors in the (English-communicating) world. I am pleased to announce plans for expansion of the journal.

The demand for space in the journal and the quality of the accepted papers continue to rise. These trends have been evident for 12 years, and the response of successive editors has been to expand the annual volumes. In 1995, the last year in which the journal comprised just four issues, there were 592 pages and 19 main papers were published. In the following year, 26 papers were published in the six issues. Since then, the annual page length has increased from around 800 to 960, and the number of published main papers has risen to over 40 (the average length has fallen). Put another way, since 1995 the number of papers published each year has approximately doubled, but the number of submissions has increased approximately one-and-a-half times. An eight-year long trend of rising submissions began in 1998, when 65 papers were received compared to 57 in 1997. Every year since the number of submissions has increased, to 136 in 2006.

The growth has not been in inappropriate or lazily prepared papers; indeed, my firm view is that, at least over the last five years, average quality has increased. We receive more papers based on large, rigorous national and special-topic databases, more papers from multi-disciplinary research teams, and more reports from concerted and well designed in-depth studies. The share of the published papers by non-UK first authors increased from 33 per cent in 1998 to 68 per cent in 2006, while between 2004 and 2006, more UK-authored papers were published each year than ever before (this is not inconsistent).

Given the discrepancy between the increases in submissions and in available pages, inevitably the final acceptance rate has fallen, to around 33 per cent. The case for expansion was clear and has been supported by our International Advisors, the Editorial Board and Cambridge University Press. Ageing & Society will expand to eight issues each year from 2008. The page length will increase to 1,280, enabling around 56 papers to be published. To enable this to be done, Mima Cattan of Leeds Metropolitan University has been appointed as the journal's first Associate Editor. Mima's academic roots are in medical sociology and anthropology.

Another imminent change is to full electronic management of the paper evaluation and decision-making process using Manuscript Central. The requirements of a paper acceptable to the system have been specified, but involve no substantial changes in the guidance to authors. Papers will have to meet certain style formats, e.g. a maximum word length for the Abstract, and we will continue to consider (although generally discourage) unusually long papers, and to accept both Harvard and Endnote referencing styles (although few now use the latter).