In 1966, John Lennon and Paul McCartney had an appointment with Bob Dylan, who at that moment was staying in the London Hilton. John and Paul wanted to learn from Bob Dylan how to be more creative in writing song lyrics. In a single session, under the influence of certain substances, the lyrics for a song were type-written on Hilton stationary. It doesn’t have a melody and was never performed. The title is pneumonia ceilings, pneumonia floors (Mark Shipper, Paperback Writer, Ace Publisher, London,1980). Pneumonia floors can be interpreted as the launch of the journal Pneumonia at the International Symposium on Pneumococci and Pneumococcal Diseases (ISPPD) at Foz de Iguacu in Brazil (Fig. 1) in 2012. It emerged from a vision shared by Alan Cripps and Bob Douglas and 43 delegates at a tri-national meeting (Indonesia, Papua New Guinea and Australia) in Sydney, Australia in 2009 on childhood pneumonia. Their vision was to establish an international forum for pneumonia for bringing together knowledge related to the pathogenesis, treatment and prevention of pneumonia.

Founding editor of Pneumonia, Alan Cripps, announcing the birth of the journal on March 11, 2012

Dr. Alan Cripps, Griffith University Health Pro Vice Chancellor, Australia, was the inaugural editor and chief for Pneumonia. His vision gave voice to research on pneumonia, especially the scientific community in emerging nations. The aspiration was to raise the global profile and awareness of pneumonia and advance the fight against childhood mortality. To this end, Pneumonia was launched and is an online, open access journal. Alan recruited a prestigious editorial board, passionate and dedicated to advancing the fight against childhood mortality due to pneumonia.

Volume 1, Issue 1 was published in December 2012. Early volumes of Pneumonia included publications from Malawi, Australia and France. The promise and threat to the success of pneumococcal conjugate vaccines, specifically serotype diversity and replacement and the financial challenge of global implementation were important themes. We now mark 10 years of activity growing from the initial visions of Dr. Allan Cripps and colleagues and brought to reality by the dedicated work of Allan, colleagues, board members, investigators, reviewers, staff, and the people from BioMed central.

The ten most accessed articles provide insight into the broad spectrum of publications and the areas of most interest to our readership (Table 1). Some of these introduced new concepts in pneumonia and have launched further studies in their themes. Themes such as long-term effects of pneumonia, duration of antimicrobial therapy in children, pulmonary impact of vaping, viral bacterial interactions remain at the forefront of challenges today in improving the outcome of pneumonia in both children and adults.