• Arthritis, Rheumatoid
• Vaccination
• Arthritis

Let me please start by wishing you, your families, your colleagues and patients a happy, healthy, peaceful, successful and prosperous New Year. In these days, we all need such wishes to come true, especially since 2022 was characterised not only by the residual pandemic,1 2 but also by the detastable and cruel Russian war against the Ukraine,3 by the consequent energy shortage and by the continuing climate crisis.4 5

Despite all these challenges, the focus on our patients and on the advancement of our field must go on, or else we let these challenges detract from and overrun the great developments we have made in the recent past and curtail the prospects for further advancements. While the foes of freedom for research, art and thought, and thus of liberty and free and humanistic evolution, may wish to see a collapse of our system of striving for innovation and for building the evidence bases for progress, it is on us to develop resilience against attempts to reverse history and the achievements of the Human Rights’ Declaration, and even more focus on our missions.

ARD and EULAR are trying to go exactly along this path. The current issue of ARD focuses on the advances that were brought about by several of EULAR’s international Task Forces. To this end, an update of the EULAR recommendations for the management of RA,6 accompanied by three systematic literature researches,7–9 is now presented. These recommendations account for the most recent developments in the field and do not back away from thoroughly addressing challenges that have occurred in the recent past.10 11 Indeed, as hopefully exemplified in these recommendations, challenges are here to be recognised and tackled in a comprehensive way. Other updates deal with axial spondyloarthritis,12–14 vaccination in children with rheumatic diseases15 and lifestyle behaviour.16 These are complemented by points to consider work participation17 and therapeutic drug monitoring.18 All these documents are presented to the rheumatology community and all other stakeholders in this issue to welcome the New Year with EULAR’s most recent thinking. And all these papers also have a research agenda to foster future research for the advancement of rheumatology.

EULAR and The American College of Rheumatology (ACR) collaborate closely and this is exemplified by common criteria, recommendations or definitions. Indeed, one of the earliest pieces of evidence for this collaboration was the development of a definition of remission for rheumatoid arthritis published in parallel in both journals.19 20 The ACR-EULAR Boolean and index-based (SDAI, CDAI) remission definitions have stood the test of time as being not only stringent but also not affected by differences in modes of action of various therapies.21 They are still widely achievable with appropriate therapies, as recently exemplified in the NORD-STAR trial where 40%–50% of patients with early RA reached this target independently of the type of drug used.22 However, some patients miss Boolean remission simply because the threshold for the patient global assessment may have been set too tightly in the original definition.23 In yet another collaborative activity between ACR and EULAR, this threshold has now been revised and the revised definition, as approved by both organisations, is presented in the January issues of both ARD and Arthritis & Rheumatology (A&R).

When speaking of the close collaboration between the two organisations, one has to also mention the fact that A&R and ARD, the official ACR and EULAR journals, respectively, are also closely cooperating beyond the mere publication of their parent organisations’ common papers. Indeed, at the 2022 ACR Convergence Meeting in Philadelphia, this cooperation became particularly visible by virtue of a joint session in which two recent papers from each of the two journals were highlighted and the session cochaired by the two editors-in-chief (Daniel Solomon for A&R). This activity will continue at the EULAR Congress in Milan in June 2023 and hopefully also at subsequent events.

The strength of every journal is not only contingent on the quality of the research submitted, but depends heavily on the determination and quality of the associate editors, the editorial board and especially of the referees. They all deserve, and have, my huge gratitude and appreciation for their vital work which ultimately results in the value of a journal to its readers. To further increase this value for the readers, ARD’s associate editors will convey a new way of addressing the latest insights made in the journal within the various subspecialties of rheumatology. Realising that individual publications on the most recent advances are always dispersed across many issues and never presented in a coherent fashion, a series titled ‘The ARD collection of recent advances in …’ will be established. In this series, our associate editors, experts in their respective fields, will compile virtual issues covering specific areas throughout the year. These issues will highlight important studies as published in the journal over the latest years, with the editorial teams summarising the ‘new wisdom’ by explaining the impact those papers have made on the field. For our readers, these virtual issues will provide a succinct overview of advances made by research activities presented in ARD. This does not mean that research published in other journals may not also be of importance, but given that so many investigations have found their reflection within ARD, it was deemed worthy to encircle these for the ARD community of clinicians and researchers. Equally importantly, the privilege to have outstanding associate editors spanning a broad expertise on board makes such an endeavour easily possible. I sincerely thank all of them for their enthusiasm in taking on this novel task. We plan to start this ‘ARD collection’ in the spring of 2023 with a focus on systemic lupus erythematosus, in particular lupus nephritis. This activity will be continued about quarterly with various other topics throughout the next 2 years. We hope that you will like these collections and look forward to your feedback.

Before closing, allow me please to thank you as the readers of ARD for your continuous loyalty and support. This support of the EULAR Journal obviously also relates to EULAR, the rheumatology organisation that celebrated its 75th anniversary last year, 75 years of progress in our field as witnessed by ARD all along.24–26 And by the way, when I initially mentioned the International Declaration of Human Rights it is noteworthy that this Bill will celebrate its 75th anniversary this year.27 So let me reiterate my wholehearted hope that a peaceful end to wars in Europe and the rest of the world will be attained very soon and again convey my very best wishes to all of you