As a journal of the Croatian Cardiac Society, it has promoted the profession of cardiology since its inception in both its printed and parallel electronic formats, emphasizing the contribution of Croatian knowledge within the framework of European cardiology. Just like the development of the great national cardiologic project, the Croatian Primary Percutaneous Coronary Intervention Network, the development of the serial publications of Cardiologia Croatica took place gradually over the past 15 years, as a result of much enthusiasm and hard work.

Soon after the formation of the website kardio.hr, we have addressed various technical, organizational, editorial, distributional, and similar challenges since May 2006 as part of the publication the newsletter of the society entitled KARDIO LIST. The newsletter was envisaged as a monthly publication consisting of 500 copies. (1) As we began to receive more and more new and interesting submissions, in 2007 we replaced the cardiologic newsletter (an unusual format for Croatian journal publishing, 22.5×12.5 cm in size; Figure 1) with a somewhat larger (16.5×22.5 cm) bimonthly issue which has since been published at an average 1100 copies per issue (Table 1). Publication of parallel columns of the full text of articles in both Croatian and English required the current journal dimension which have been available since 2008. Thanks to its open access approach, the journal was then indexed for the first time in an international program (HINARI). (2, 3) Towards the end of 2011, individual articles of the KARDIO LIST journal were indexed in the Portal of Croatian Scientific and Professional Journals (HRČAK) (https://hrcak.srce.hr/; Table 2) and in the international EBSCO database (4) that can be accessed through the EBSCOhost platform at the Portal of Electronic Sources for the Croatian Academic and Scientific Community (http://baze.nsk.hr/). This was a significant achievement for the journal since the published and indexed articles became much more accessible and could be used as qualifications for academic promotion.

In June 2012, the title of the journal was changed to Cardiologia Croatica for better international accessibility, which was accompanied by a shift to larger issues and color printing on all of the journal’s pages. Educating the members of the Editorial Board, adherence to the principles recommended by international organizations of journal editors (International Committee of Medical Journal Editors, Committee on Publication Ethics, European Association of Science Editors, etc.), and joining the Editors Network of the European Society of Cardiology National Cardiac Society Journals has resulted in the achievement of a modern standard of editorial work and publishing. (5, 6) The Medicinska naklada publishing house has been a co-publisher of the journal since mid-2014 and has significantly improved the design and production of the journal in cooperation with the editors. This has included the introduction and use of standards such as XML (eXtensible Markup Language) translation, QR codes (Quick Response code), and DOI (Digital Object Identifier) numbers (Table 3), as well as the identification of authors using ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) numbers. (7)

Further developments of the journal are the result of greater online visibility and accessibility of the journal, open access, active cooperation with the authors, a policy of never charging for article publication, and continued support from the journal’s permanent sponsor.