Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy (2002) 50, 443-444
© 2002 The British Society for Antimicrobial Chemotherapy
JAC Advance Access—accelerated online publication (www.jac.oupjournals.org)
David S. Reeves* and
Colin W. E. Drummond
JAC Editorial Office, 11 The Wharf, 16 Bridge Street, Birmingham B1 2JS, UK
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Introduction
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We are pleased to announce the launch of JAC Advance Access,
the
Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy’s new system
for the early online publication of articles ahead of the monthly
printed journal issue. JAC Advance Access will reduce the time
from acceptance to publication for JAC articles. Advance Access
papers will be posted in batches at approximately fourteen day
intervals, in some cases articles will be available online a
full calendar month ahead of their appearance in the printed
journal. The first JAC Advance Access papers were published
on 6 September 2002 and appear in print in this issue of JAC.
If you are a subscriber, you can view the latest batch by visiting
www.jac.oupjournals.org and clicking the Advance Access link.
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Publication online ahead of print
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There are several possible models for the online publication
of material submitted to journals. At JAC we have selected perhaps
the most conservative model, but one that we believe to be the
most clear for readers and authors. Manuscripts will not be
published online until the author and proofreader corrections
have been incorporated. At this time the form of the article
is entirely fixed and it is truly ready for publication (authors
will not be able to make any changes once the article has been
published online). Some journals publish articles online as
early as immediately after acceptance, however, this can lead
to the emergence of several versions of the article. We regard
this as confusing and it has the potential to undermine readers’
confidence. In JAC the version published online will be identical
to the final printed version, except that there will be no proper
page numbers in the online paper (in all Advance Access papers
the pages will be numbered ‘1 of
n’ and so on, where
n is the total page extent of the article). Papers will be removed
from the JAC Advance Access site once they have appeared in
the printed journal.
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Who will be able to read papers in JAC Advance Access?
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This service will be available to all institutional and individual
subscribers who have activated their online subscription (if
you are a current subscriber you can find information on how
to activate your online access at
http://www3.oup.co. uk/jnls/prices/online.pdf).
At present there will be no e-mail alerting system for papers
posted in JAC Advance Access. This contrasts with the eTOCs
(electronic table of contents) alerting system for the regular
issue (you can join the eTOCs service at
http://www3.oup.co.uk/jac/etoc.html).
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How to cite papers published online
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Every paper published online will have a unique reference tag,
the digital object identifier (DOI). DOIs are a publisher-led
approach to the long-term identification problems associated
with material available online. All papers published in JAC
now carry a DOI, which appears on the first page above the title.
For a paper that has been published online, but has not yet
appeared in print, those wishing to cite it should give the
DOI in place of the volume and page numbers. Once published
in print the traditional volume and page numbers should be given.
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What about MEDLINE?
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We are working with HighWire Press to ensure that as soon as
a batch of articles is posted online, the relevant information
will be submitted to PubMed for indexing. Once PubMed has uploaded
this information, these papers will be found by MEDLINE searches.
Unfortunately, we have no control over how rapidly PubMed upload
this information.
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Concluding remarks
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In May this year, we introduced JAC Manuscript Central (
http://jac.manuscriptcentral.com),
an online manuscript submission and refereeing system. One of
the predicted advantages of this system is a substantial improvement
in the average time taken to process submitted articles. The
extent of the improvement is beginning to become tangible, although
it will be several months more before reliable figures will
be available.
JAC Advance Access will further shorten JAC handling times by reducing the time between acceptance and publication. Thus JAC is addressing both the pre- and post-acceptance components of the overall time to publication—which is one of the factors consistently rated as highly important by authors when choosing where to submit their work.
We believe this is another highly significant step towards making JAC the first-choice journal in the field of antimicrobial chemotherapy for both authors and subscribers.
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Footnotes
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* Corresponding author. Tel: +44-121-633-0415; Fax: +44-121-643-9497.
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Introduction
Publication online ahead of...