The World Federation for Medical Education (WFME) as sponsor of Educación Médica Internacional

Starting the 8th year of publishing Educación Médica Internacional, its editors feel satisfied enough to be willing to share with all the subscribers and readers this felt emotion.

Educación Médica Internacional is a journal edited in Spanish. From its very start the editors' desire was to offer to the Spanish speaking world a journal of quality, which original articles submitted for publication would be peer-reviewed under accepted rigorous international criteria. The intention has always been not to become a protected "reserve" far away from the prevailing scientific standards of all the biomedical scientific journals edited in English.

This has not been an easy challenge to face. Before we started this journey we faced plenty of sceptical opinions, critical positions and destructive voices rejecting the idea of editing Educación Médica Internacional in Spanish. But the time flown in between has showed that Educación Médica Internacional has found a space for its one and fulfils interests and needs that have provided intrinsic value to the journal. We believe that a great deal of this success it can be attributed not only to our perseverance but also to have successfully aimed to balance the contributions from the Spanish speaking world with what is usually expressed in English.

In our presently globalized world, medical education can no longer remain as "always" keeping its traditional formats without considering at all neither the new educational developments nor the emerging new values or the renewed social needs. Along the last seven years Educación Médica Internacional has attempted to contribute to our socio-cultural environment all the internationally validated new educational developments while at the same time has attempted to diffuse the contributions of the Latin-American and Spanish speaking world in the field of medical education.

The search for editorial rigor that has guided the Foundation responsible for editing Educación Médica Internacional begins to be internationally recognized. The World Federation for Medical Education (WFME) has accepted to become the first among all the sponsoring organizations of Educación Médica Internacional As such Educación Médica Internacional will be in the situation to translate to Spanish and publish the documents produced by WFME. The WFME's logo will from now on appear at the front page of Educación Médica Internacional as a symbol of our compromise to serve and a recognition of the service. We gladly accept this demanding challenge while we tell you proudly.

Barcelona, February 2005