A Message From the Editor
A Message From the Editor
In recent years, I have attended the annual meeting of the Council of Science Editors (CSE), which occurs every May. This year, the meeting was in Denver, Colorado, and five of us from Public Health Reports (PHR) attended. As always, the meeting was a great opportunity to catch up on what other journals are doing in the rapidly evolving world of scientific publishing. One topic of discussion was the move to ‘‘continuous publication,’’ the practice of publishing articles individually online as soon as they have finished final editing and design instead of holding them for days or weeks to publish them as part of an issue. These articles may ultimately appear in an issue, but at the time they are published online, they might not be associated with an issue. (Some journals have no issues at all, and the articles never become part of an issue.) These online articles do, however, become part of the scientific literature as soon as they appear. They are indexed and citable right away through the use of digital object identifiers (DOIs). The trend toward continuous publication is not new. At the recent CSE meeting, Trish Groves, MBBS, MRCPsych, a BMJ director and editor in chief of the online-only journal BMJ Open, noted that The BMJ went to continuous publication in 2008 and was one of the first major medical publications to do so. Now, many journals are heading toward continuous publication, because it can reduce the time from acceptance to publication and allow readers to access content much faster. Continuous publication also provides greater flexibility in the ways publishers can disseminate content.1 Preventing Chronic Disease, a journal published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has been online only since its first issue in 2004 and continuously since 2012. People read journals much differently now than they did decades ago. When I was a medical student in the 1970s, we read journals as whole issues almost as much as we read individual articles dredged up from the library. The New England Journal of Medicine arrived in the postal mail every week in its brown paper cover. My classmates and I perused it pretty much from beginning to end. We might not have realized it then by name, but we were browsing a journal. Today’s reader is less apt to sit down with a journal and browse it from front to back. Instead, readers now tend to go to a publisher’s or journal’s website or a repository to read an article brought to their attention in many
Public Health Reports 2016, Vol. 131(5) 732-733 ª 2016, Association of Schools and Programs of Public Health. All rights reserved. Reprints and permission: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0033354916663492 phr.sagepub.com
different ways—through a bibliographic database, search engine, website of various sorts, journal alert, news item, Facebook or Twitter mention, or other electronic means.2 With fewer readers browsing journals, individual articles are less associated with the issue in which they may appear, and the concept of an issue of a journal becomes less relevant. Throughout its long history, PHR has published traditionally, as a weekly, then as a monthly, and since the 1970s, as a bimonthly. Articles appeared when the issue was published in print or, more recently, online. Although PHR has regularly released articles online ahead of print, these articles did not become part of the indexed literature until the issue appeared later. Now, as the journal modernizes,3 PHR is moving to continuous publication. This issue of PHR (September/October 2016) is the first to be produced fully by our new publishing partner, SAGE Publishing, Inc. As part of our move to SAGE, PHR is now routinely publishing most accepted articles online ahead of print through SAGE’s OnlineFirst platform.4 The journal is not leaving the issue concept behind entirely. We will still publish bimonthly issues online and in print, and some articles will appear only when a particular issue is published (e.g., articles that appear in our supplements will appear together when the supplement is published). But most accepted articles will be hosted in OnlineFirst as soon as they finish final editing and formatting. OnlineFirst offers many advantages to authors and readers. The greatest advantage is a big reduction in time from final acceptance to publication. All articles that are hosted by OnlineFirst will have a DOI number and will be immediately citable. Authors will be able to get their work into the literature faster, and readers will be able to see the latest articles much more quickly. With fewer readers browsing issues of PHR than in past decades, our transition to SAGE seems to be the right time to discontinue the regular ‘‘Message From the Editor’’ that we have run in each issue since the late 1990s. These messages were started by former Editor in Chief Robert Rinsky, and they served important purposes, such as allowing the editor to tell readers about the business of the journal, to comment on top public health events of the day, and to highlight important content in the issue. I and future editors will continue to write occasional commentaries in the journal, but only when there is something we want to say on a particular
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topic. And those commentaries, like most other PHR articles, will be published online first. Frederic E. Shaw, MD, JD Editor in Chief References 1. Godlee F, Delamothe T, Smith J. Continuous publication. BMJ. 2008;336:1450.
2. Gardner T, Inger S. How readers discover content in scholarly publications. Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Simon Inger Consulting. http://www.simoningerconsulting.com/nar/how_ readers_discover.html. Published March 2016. Accessed July 26, 2016. 3. Shaw FE. A message from the editor. Public Health Rep. 2016; 131:732-733. 4. SAGE Journals. What is OnlineFirst? http://online.sagepub.com/ site/sphelp/SageColl_PAP.xhtml. Accessed July 26, 2016.
A Message From the Editor
In recent years, I have attended the annual meeting of the Council of Science Editors (CSE), which occurs every May. This year, the meeting was in Denver, Colorado, and five of us from Public Health Reports (PHR) attended. As always, the meeting was a great opportunity to catch up on what other journals are doing in the rapidly evolving world of scientific publishing. One topic of discussion was the move to ‘‘continuous publication,’’ the practice of publishing articles individually online as soon as they have finished final editing and design instead of holding them for days or weeks to publish them as part of an issue. These articles may ultimately appear in an issue, but at the time they are published online, they might not be associated with an issue. (Some journals have no issues at all, and the articles never become part of an issue.) These online articles do, however, become part of the scientific literature as soon as they appear. They are indexed and citable right away through the use of digital object identifiers (DOIs). The trend toward continuous publication is not new. At the recent CSE meeting, Trish Groves, MBBS, MRCPsych, a BMJ director and editor in chief of the online-only journal BMJ Open, noted that The BMJ went to continuous publication in 2008 and was one of the first major medical publications to do so. Now, many journals are heading toward continuous publication, because it can reduce the time from acceptance to publication and allow readers to access content much faster. Continuous publication also provides greater flexibility in the ways publishers can disseminate content.1 Preventing Chronic Disease, a journal published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has been online only since its first issue in 2004 and continuously since 2012. People read journals much differently now than they did decades ago. When I was a medical student in the 1970s, we read journals as whole issues almost as much as we read individual articles dredged up from the library. The New England Journal of Medicine arrived in the postal mail every week in its brown paper cover. My classmates and I perused it pretty much from beginning to end. We might not have realized it then by name, but we were browsing a journal. Today’s reader is less apt to sit down with a journal and browse it from front to back. Instead, readers now tend to go to a publisher’s or journal’s website or a repository to read an article brought to their attention in many
Public Health Reports 2016, Vol. 131(5) 732-733 ª 2016, Association of Schools and Programs of Public Health. All rights reserved. Reprints and permission: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0033354916663492 phr.sagepub.com
different ways—through a bibliographic database, search engine, website of various sorts, journal alert, news item, Facebook or Twitter mention, or other electronic means.2 With fewer readers browsing journals, individual articles are less associated with the issue in which they may appear, and the concept of an issue of a journal becomes less relevant. Throughout its long history, PHR has published traditionally, as a weekly, then as a monthly, and since the 1970s, as a bimonthly. Articles appeared when the issue was published in print or, more recently, online. Although PHR has regularly released articles online ahead of print, these articles did not become part of the indexed literature until the issue appeared later. Now, as the journal modernizes,3 PHR is moving to continuous publication. This issue of PHR (September/October 2016) is the first to be produced fully by our new publishing partner, SAGE Publishing, Inc. As part of our move to SAGE, PHR is now routinely publishing most accepted articles online ahead of print through SAGE’s OnlineFirst platform.4 The journal is not leaving the issue concept behind entirely. We will still publish bimonthly issues online and in print, and some articles will appear only when a particular issue is published (e.g., articles that appear in our supplements will appear together when the supplement is published). But most accepted articles will be hosted in OnlineFirst as soon as they finish final editing and formatting. OnlineFirst offers many advantages to authors and readers. The greatest advantage is a big reduction in time from final acceptance to publication. All articles that are hosted by OnlineFirst will have a DOI number and will be immediately citable. Authors will be able to get their work into the literature faster, and readers will be able to see the latest articles much more quickly. With fewer readers browsing issues of PHR than in past decades, our transition to SAGE seems to be the right time to discontinue the regular ‘‘Message From the Editor’’ that we have run in each issue since the late 1990s. These messages were started by former Editor in Chief Robert Rinsky, and they served important purposes, such as allowing the editor to tell readers about the business of the journal, to comment on top public health events of the day, and to highlight important content in the issue. I and future editors will continue to write occasional commentaries in the journal, but only when there is something we want to say on a particular
Shaw
733
topic. And those commentaries, like most other PHR articles, will be published online first. Frederic E. Shaw, MD, JD Editor in Chief References 1. Godlee F, Delamothe T, Smith J. Continuous publication. BMJ. 2008;336:1450.
2. Gardner T, Inger S. How readers discover content in scholarly publications. Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Simon Inger Consulting. http://www.simoningerconsulting.com/nar/how_ readers_discover.html. Published March 2016. Accessed July 26, 2016. 3. Shaw FE. A message from the editor. Public Health Rep. 2016; 131:732-733. 4. SAGE Journals. What is OnlineFirst? http://online.sagepub.com/ site/sphelp/SageColl_PAP.xhtml. Accessed July 26, 2016.
