Welcome to a New Journal—Journal of Fertility Preservation

The medical subdiscipline of fertility preservation was born from the desire of human beings to have a proper child. Cancer patients undergoing treatments with gonadotoxic sideeffects leading to sterility or infertility and women and men with benign conditions that can negatively affect their quantity and/or quality of gametes have been the most important drivers for the development of this field. In addition, fertility preservation has been also propelled by different issues from healthy women and men. Delay of childbearing age for professional or personal reasons, new data on risks of fathering children into older ages for men and the adverse effects of gender affirming procedures on the reproductive potential of transgender people, and so on, have increased the development and application of fertility preservation strategies and the importance of this field in current times. Moreover, fertility preservation is not only a concern in humans, as the need for the preservation of genetic material from endangered species, animals with important genetic traits or biobanking in general will also greatly benefit from the development of alternative preservation strategies which might be forced upon us by the inevitable consequences of environmental and climate change. In addition, to further optimize fertility preservation strategies, the use of animal in vitro models will certainly benefit progress in both the human and animal research fields. As a consequence, research results on “fertility preservation” at the level of an individual patient or specimen will be often translated into “species preservation” when these techniques are more broadly applied, thereby elevating (fertility) preservation from the individual to the population level. While numerous journals, notably on reproductive medicine or assisted reproductive technology, have been publishing articles on fertility preservation, this field has been exponentially growing with the development of new strategies, patient surveys, important ethics discussions, impact of this strategy on patients and animals, etc. In the last year, almost 200 papers (original articles, reviews and editorials) with “fertility preservation” in their title were published in 50 different journals. For the scientific community and professionals working in this field, it can be quite challenging to keep updated having to perform a continuous extensive literature search.