BJR Advance – A new service of Publish Ahead of Print

It is increasingly important for medical journals and more specifically for those focusing on best practice using health care technology to remain at the cutting edge of publishing and to provide such facilities for its authors and readers. In particular they must take advantage of all the electronic developments available in modern-day publishing. In this context we are very pleased to announce our new online publication service, BJR Advance .

From April 2006, readers of The British Journal of Radiology (BJR) will find even more content online. BJR Advance, the journal’s website for publishing papers electronically ahead of print will be launched at http://bjr.birjournal.org.

Since the BJR launched its online submission and peer review system in June 2004, the number of submissions has doubled, and the number of papers accepted for publication has increased. With the introduction of BJR Advance, the majority of these papers will be published on line earlier than their printed version. Notwithstanding, we are also committed to ensuring that those articles accepted for publication in print will appear within a reasonable time scale.

BJR Advance will bring readers full papers, reviews, pictorial reviews and commentaries on Diagnostic Radiology, Radiotherapy and Oncology, Medical Physics, and Radiobiology several weeks in advance of the printed edition of BJR. The site will be updated bi-monthly with the latest research.

All BJR Advance manuscripts will undergo the complete peer-review process and are essentially the same version of the article that will appear in print. They will have been peer reviewed, revised by the authors, copyedited, typeset, and approved by the authors and BJR editors. There may be minor typographical errors, which will be corrected in the final print and online versions, however there will be no substantive factual changes.

Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) will be used as the Article IDs for all pre-press articles. The DOI is a specification and a system to support unique and permanent identifiers for content in an electronic environment, developed by the non-profit International DOI Foundation (http://www.doi.org). The DOIs will serve as “serial numbers” for articles, unambiguously identifying each one.

Like regular journal content, all BJR Advance articles will be deposited with the National Library of Medicine for inclusion in Medline and PubMed to ensure early and wide dissemination. In additional all pre-press articles will be fully searchable and references will be hyperlinked.

Authors and researchers should be assured that for citation purposes the DOI can replace the year, volume, and page numbers for a given article. For example,

• For a BJR Advance article just posted online: Published May 6, 2006, Br J Radiol, 10.1259/bjr/83624598

• Then, once the article appears in print or is accessible on BJR Online: Br J Radiol, 2006 75: 356-361

• If the exact publication date is important (e.g. for an author) Published May 6, 2006, 10.1259/bjr/83624598 Br J Radiol, 2006 75: 356-361

This new section of BJR online will have a link from the journal homepage. A reader who clicks on this link will be able to view, download and cite articles published in advance of print – just as they do now for current and archive journal articles. Once a printed issue of BJR is mailed, articles in the printed issue that were published on BJR Advance will move to the regular BJR Online.

We hope that this addition to the BJR will significantly improve our ability to make our authors work more speedily available to the medical community, and enhance the process of submission, publication and using our journal.