Authors, Authors, AuthorsFollow Instructions or Expect Delay

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No part of a scientific journal is less likely to be read than its Instructions for Contributors. These prescriptions, written in lifeless, leaden prose, are about as inviting as a request to serve on a committee. Without reading them, experienced authors believe they know what they sayno matter the journal. And they are mostly correct, since the style of scientific articles has changed less in three hundred years than any other genre of literature. But we are poised for profound change in the presentation of scientific papersand the way we read themgiven the unprecedented opportunities offered by the Internet.

The electronic environment is weaving itself into the fabric of science at a breathtaking pace. Just four years after the launch of the World Wide Web in 1991, HighWire Press posted online the entire content of a scientific periodical, The Journal of Biological Chemistry. Also collaborating with HighWire Press, AJRCCM went online two years later. Like most periodicals, however, AJRCCM Online simply replicated the paper journal. As such, advantages have been limited to earlier availability, better search capabilities, and savings on shelf space. Realization of the full promise of electronic publishing has been blinkered by our paper mindset.

To tap the power of the new medium, AJRCCM is changing its Instructions for Contributors.* The changes will help us satisfy previously irreconcilable expectations of readers and reviewers. Readers yearn for brief articles, but reviewers reject manuscripts when details fail to convince them of a paper's worth. And when attempting to replicate reported methodology, scientists still find essential steps unreported and phone authors requesting the necessary information. These differing expectations are sharpest in the Methods section. Taking advantage of the Web, AJRCCM will publish an extended account of Methods online and a shorter version on paper. When submitting manuscripts to AJRCCM, authors will now be required to limit Methods to 500 words. Authors are invited to submit additional detail, when appropriate, for posting in AJRCCM's Web repositoryas such, the online version will constitute the definitive description of Methods. Moving methodological detail out of the print journal does not mean we consider it unimportant or will subject it to less scrutiny. On the contrary, I suspect that future decisions for declining manuscripts will be based most often on material intended for the repository.

Posting material in the online repository is not confined to Methods. Clarifying tables, figures, or text previously deposited in cumbersome storage systems, such as the National Auxiliary Publication Service, can now be accessed at the click of a mouse. Authors can no longer defend significant omissions through lack of space, thus foiling Fermat's excuse"I have assuredly found an admirable proof of this, but the margin is too narrow to contain it"for a three century delay in learning the solution to a theorem. "Layering" makes it possible to append videoclips, other multimedia, and extensive bibliographical material. In some research fields, such as gene microarrays, huge databases can be presented only by computer, not on paper. All such supplementary material will undergo peer review in the usual manner.

Moving details of Methods and other sections into our repository will shorten the average paper in AJRCCM by one to two pages. These savings will allow us to print ten or more additional articles every month without an increase in pages. As a result, accepted articles will be printed sooner. And AJRCCM will shortly introduce the As Soon As Publishable (ASAP) format for early release of research reports. Within days of acceptance, individual manuscripts will be posted on AJRCCM's websiteeven before copyediting. You will be able to learn of new findings ten or more weeks before they appear on paper. But ASAP releases are possible only if we have your figuresnot just your manuscriptson disk.

The opportunity for posting supplemental material online is not an invitation to prolixity. We are renewing efforts for brevity in papers published in AJRCCM; formatting changes instituted by the publications policy committee have already resulted in more compact articles. On the cover page of a manuscript, authors need to state the number of words in the body of the text. This information will be used by referees and associate editors in advising authors of material better confined to the Journal's online repository.

The approach to writing a review article differs from that of a research report. Prospective authors are advised to read the general guidelines for writing review articles in AJRCCM and the reformulated instructions for each type of featured article. These guidelines also tell you what reviewers expect when they evaluate a review article. Details unique to the handling of review articles in supplements of AJRCCM can also be found on our Website.

The diffusion of a new technology through a community follows an S-shaped curve. Data on use of AJRCCM Online suggest we are hovering around the lower inflection point ending the early adoption phase and probably already starting the phase of rapid growth. AJRCCM Online is now receiving more than 42,000 hits a weektwice that of a year ago and more than double the annual subscriptions to the print journal. These hits are coming from more than sixty countries reflecting the global community served by AJRCCM. This community can engage in group discussion in our correspondence columns. These columns enable penetrating post-publication peer review, as writers often raise issues missed by authors and reviewers. And the handling of letters is also being changed by electronic technology. With hypertext links, letters can be directly linked to a previously printed paper; we can also post letters online sooner than we can print them. We welcome your lettersbut please follow our guidelines when you write them.

At AJRCCM, we realize our most valuable resource is the intellectual capital donated by peer reviewers. The improvement to a manuscript from submission to publication depends on how well an editor matches its content with reviewer expertise. We have recently developed an online database of AJRCCM's most frequently used reviewers, grading their expertise in 172 subject categories covered by the Journal. To maximize the match between manuscript content and reviewer expertise, submitting authors are now requested to list up to three descriptors that best describe their manuscript. With planned software modifications, associate editors will be able to score reviewers for rigor, fairness, and promptnessall aimed at better serving authors and readers.

Citation of sources is as old as scholarship itselfwitness the term scholia for the ancient footnote. References are the glue connecting a manuscript to previously published work in a field. And they offer a portal to the novice entering a field of inquiry. But, again, the Web is expanding their usefulness. With forward citing, you can go immediately to articles that subsequently cited the one you have been readingan impossibility in the offline world. Readers can hotlink from one article to another, andif the business model gets worked out they will be able to seamlessly traverse the scientific corpus. Since June, AJRCCM has been providing content older than a year at no charge to anyone with Internet accessand we are investigating methods to make all content free to institutions in developing countries. We have also joined more than eighty HighWire Press journals in generating the largest free archive of peer-reviewed, life-science reports172,000 full-text articles and rapidly growingcompletely dwarfing the PubMed Central initiative. Recognizing the changing role of references, AJRCCM no longer limits their number to 35 per manuscript. This change brings us in line with our sister journal, AJRCMB, and subspeciality journals like Circulation Research and Gastroenterology.

It is trite to say that authors write to be read. Just as research is not completed till it is in print, publications serve no purpose unless others build on them. With growing dependence on computerized archiving, it is essential that the articles of an author are included in many of the 250 million searches processed each year by PubMed (eight years ago, only 5 million searches were being processed by the National Library of Medicine). Bibliographical searches, however, can fail to retrieve half to three-quarters of relevant articles on a topic, especially when the search term is not appropriate for the target domain. To increase the number of AJRCCM articles included in a search, we are changing our policy on key words: authors are now required to write three to five indexing terms on the page of the abstract. When choosing these words, it is best to employ MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) terms, the controlled vocabulary used by PubMed. Indexers possess less expertise in the scientific content of a manuscript than its authors, and the fidelity of bibliographical searches can be improved when authors select their own key words. A few minutes in front of the MeSH browser, freely available at PubMed, will help you select words that increase the chance, as much as fivefold, of your article showing up in literature searches.

Not all the change with electronic publishing is for the better. The distribution of nonreviewed manuscripts by an electronic server, so called e-prints, fosters the dissemination of inchoate ideas and premature claim staking. At AJRCCM, we regard an e-print as constituting a prior publication. Accordingly, we now request authors to state explicitly that the submitted material was not previously disseminated as an e-print. We do not consider e-mail transmission of a working draft to a dozen or so fellow scientists to constitute an e-print.

Electronic technology makes it easy to add appendages to the Instructions for Contributors and modify them from time to time. Given the fluidity of Web-based publishing, please access the latest Instructions when submitting a manuscript to AJRCCM. Authors failing to follow the new requirements will encounter a delay in the peer-review of their manuscript. All the new steps are listed in our new Submission Form, and this form needs to be completed and included with future submissions.

By exploiting the electronic environment, we hope to better serve the global community of AJRCCM and take the next step in the Journal's evolution. But you may ask, should we not wait and see how other journals fare in implementing the new technology? Yes, it is true that most journals are still simply mounting electronic images of their printed pages. But others like Science, JBC, PNAS and Nature have shed their paper exoskeleton and are already appending electronic supplements. Indeed, the present posting of papers online, not just their past printing on paper, is mere prologue of formats yet to unfold. In taking the next step, we are mindful of the admonition of Alexander Pope: "Be not the first by whom the new are tried, / Nor yet the last to lay the old aside." And finally, the new order does not mean we value form over content. Acceptance of articles will continue to depend an originality, validity, and importance: poor research can never produce a good article no matter how perfect the presentation.

	Footnotes

^*  Readers of the online version of AJRCCM will find nine hypertext links to additional information on issues raised in this editorial.