Gerard Sanderink
E-mail: g.sanderink@acta.nl

From left to right: Luc Habets (treasurer), Gerard Sanderink and Yvonne Emmer (administrative co-ordinator)

Less than one year from now we will meet in Florianopolis, Brazil, during our 14th International Congress. Our president Edemir Costa, vice-president Murillo Abreu and their local team have made already all major steps to make this meeting one to remember. A solid plan for the budget was developed and since a long time ago we will not be faced with increasing congress registration fees and high hotel prices. These are all good reasons to participate in this meeting.

In the past months the Office of the Secretariat handled more than 200 membership renewals.

For the first time it was possible to renew membership using the electronic form at the IADMFR website. This form, where in a protected mode data can be sent to the Secretariat, appeared to be a great success. Already more than 50% of all the renewal was made using the form. It saves Yvonne Emmer a lot of work, in particular deciphering handwritten text and credit card numbers. I regret that still about 50 members did not renew their membership until now. In the next months most of them will but prompt response would make it easier for us.

In 2001 the present publisher of our journal Nature Publishing Group (NPG) announced not to continue the contract after January 2004. NPG has changes it strategies and will focus only on major, widely spread, journals. Since than, our Editor Douglas Benn invited a number of candidate publishers to make bids to take over publication. Our previous editor Peter Hirschmann also advises Douglas. At the moment negotiations with a future publisher are in a final stage. It might happen that already starting January 2003.

The IADMFR web site address has changed as well. Until last year the physical location of the web site was at the dental School in Amsterdam. A drawback of this location was that it was difficult, as a web master, to get access from outside the dental school. Now an external provider hosts the site, this makes access and future transfer easier. In case you are interested to cooperate in improving our site (at a voluntary base) please contact me.