Celebrating forty years of unbroken publication of the Revista Española de Drogodependencias (RED) in 2016 is the excuse put forward to look through the history of this journal and its development as regards its objectives, editorial policy, format and presentation.

Over all these years, in which new journals have been seen to come out and some indeed disappear as a result of the difficult situation which publishing scientific texts in Spain is going through, the RED has managed to adapt to the new times and improve the criteria for

evaluating the quality of journals, drawing this increasingly closer to international standards.