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A Great Harvest

rstanley{at}ajroffice.org
ejstern{at}ajroffice.org

A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.

Herbert Simon, economist and artificial intelligence pioneer (1916-2001)

After 2 years of electronic manuscript submission and review under our belts, as we write this column in early autumn of 2005, we find that the seeds we have sown have yielded a great harvest of manuscripts of truly excellent quality from around the world. Our manuscript submission rate is up 35% this year compared with 2 years ago. So abundant is our current harvest, in fact, that we now have many more quality articles than our page budget (3,132 pages per year) allows us to print, leading to an inevitable backlog in publication. A potential delay of close to a year between acceptance and publication is not acceptable to us or to our valued contributing authors.

We are grateful to those who have gone before us, helping to create one of the world's leading radiology journals. However, what is an editor to do with the rising tsunami of manuscripts received? Several possible solutions present themselves. We can make ourselves more exclusive, discriminating, and competitive, making the hurdle for publication higher for the sake of our page budget alone. This is not necessarily fair to authors of quality manuscripts, but it is a reasonable business strategy.

Another trick up our collective sleeves is to publish ahead of print. This certainly would get timely information out to our readers more expeditiously but does not lessen the eventual need to address our page budget and would largely be limited to very urgent communications—for example, emergent information on SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome).

As discussed in prior columns, we have the ability to enhance our print versions with supplemental files such as large databases, movie files, and so forth that do not lend themselves to print. But these additions are just that: supplements. Available to us, as of January 2006, is a potential win-win solution. With the advent of digital object identifiers (DOIs), which provide a unique and permanent "citation" for articles published only in an electronic form (to be discussed in a future column), the official journal of record—heretofore the print journal—will now be the AJR online (www.ajronline.org). With no physical page limit, and no printing and mailings costs for the official electronic journal of record, we can publish all acceptable material electronically, at a reduced cost, instead of queuing articles for printing within our page budget constraints. Publishing, after all, is the act of making something known to the public; it does not require printing on paper. The electronic dissemination of the journal can be so much more than the print version.

This begs the question, what of the paper journal? Rest assured, the paper version of the AJR is alive and well, and we will continue it in its familiar form for a good number of years in the future. But when we follow this path, we will now have multiple options available to us. We can selectively choose to print certain types of manuscripts of the editor's choice. For example, we could limit the publication of case reports to the online journal only. Or we could print abbreviated versions of the electronic full-length articles. These considerations are currently under discussion.

We are interested in knowing your opinions on this topic. We do not know how many of our subscribers use the AJR Web site to read the journal. Would we do an injustice to those in our readership who seldom use a computer to read the AJR or search the literature? Please e-mail us at rstanley{at}ajroffice.org with your thoughts.

As the calendar year comes to an end, we wish all of our contributing authors, our dedicated reviewers, our subscribers, and our many other friends and colleagues, one and all, best wishes for the Holiday Season and the New Year.

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This Article Full Text (PDF) Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Alert me to new issues of the journal Download to citation manager Citing Articles Citing Articles via Google Scholar Google Scholar Articles by Stanley, R. J. Articles by Stern, E. J. Search for Related Content PubMed Articles by Stanley, R. J. Articles by Stern, E. J. Social Bookmarking                      What's this?