During the first year of our journal, we made every effort to catch up with international standards and even lead the way. Ultrasonography has become indexed by PubMed Central and covered by PubMed (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=Ultrasonography[jour]) since July 2014, and full-text papers can be searched and freely downloaded from the earliest electronically published status, ahead of print. For identification of individual authors, the readers could access the ORCID (http://orcid.org/) identification of the authors via the journal website (http://www.e-ultrasonography.org/) as well as in the printed journals. Our journal submission page (http://submit.e-ultrasonography.org/) provides CrossCheck (http://www.crossref.org/crosscheck/index.html) information for all individual submitted papers to prevent any potential plagiarism. The CrossMark identification service (http://www.crossref.org/crossmark/) is also available at the journal website to update the status of all papers as they are published. Ultrasonography encourages video presentations to enhance understanding of the real-time properties of ultrasound procedures, and we have a YouTube address (http://www.youtube.com/user/Ultrasonography2014/) in addition to providing direct viewing of all video clips associated with published papers on the journal website.

After the launching of the journal website, a total of ten thousands visit sessions from 115 different countries have been recorded (https://www.google.com/analytics/). Among the 40 articles (25 original articles, eight review articles, seven case reports) published in the four issues of Volume 33 in the first year, a review article and an original article on thyroid imaging dealing with elastography and TI-RAD were most frequently clicked on by readers (http://www.e-ultrasonography.org/index.html?v_type=4), reflecting current interests in clinical practice [2,3].

To develop into an internationally renowned journal, however, we have some problems. Most of the journal’s papers have been written by authors from the Republic of Korea. Even though our papers can be easily accessed via PubMed and Google Scholar (http://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_publication=Ultrasonography), more than 60% of the readers of our journal website are still based in Korea. Given the short time period of international exposure as an open access journal published in English, despite many visits to the journal website from all around the world, citations of our papers by international researchers have remained limited up to the present.

To improve the quality of the journal’s content and draw a more diverse readership, we plan to invite international scholars to submit reviews of the latest knowledge or introductions to novel technologies. Along with the success of the annual international meeting of our society, the KSUM Open (http://2014.ksum.or.kr/), the editorial committee is encouraging conference presenters to prepare comprehensive review articles covering all the fields of medical ultrasound to enhance education for practitioners [4,5]. International researchers in the engineering of imaging technology are also invited to exchange their knowledge by publishing articles as well as presenting at our scientific meeting. We have updated the Aims & Scope and Instructions for Authors to extend the fields and types of articles in this January 2015 issue. Besides Original Articles, Review Articles, Pictorial Essays and Case Reports, two new types, Technical Notes and Perspectives have been added to keep readers up with ongoing technical developments and innovative concepts.

To publish a strong range of high quality content, no authors’ submission fee or other publication-related fee has been applied for any international researchers since all costs of the publication process are underwritten by KSUM. In the mobile world, free applications are also available for all issues on the App Store and Google Play, optimizing the best in digital technology to enhance a print-like reading experience with article-sharing features and more.

During the first year of Ultrasonography, the review processes were completed and the statuses of manuscripts were informed within four weeks of submission in any instance. I would like to express my special gratitude to all the reviewers for their time and expertise to make timely decisions on the manuscripts.