Rapid Electronic Publication: Making the Journal More Competitive for Experimental Papers (2005)

A number of changes in the Journal have been put into place in the past 6 months, including moving the editorial office to Dallas, instituting electronic submission, and selecting a new editorial management team. These changes have been implemented by the Editorial Board and the American Society of Plastic Surgeons to ensure that the Journal remains the most widely read and most respected peer-reviewed plastic surgery journal in the world. The Journal serves a vital role in publishing state-of-the-art articles covering all aspects of plastic surgery, both clinical and experimental. Because the clinical scope of plastic surgery is “the skin and its contents,” the range of clinical topics includes craniofacial surgery, hand surgery, microsurgery, reconstructive surgery, outcome studies, and cosmetic surgery. The leadership of the Journal is committed to publishing high-quality articles that reflect the full breadth of plastic and reconstructive surgery clinically. This is largely accomplished in the current format of the Journal for clinical papers; however, in order to attract the best scientific papers related to plastic surgery research, the Journal may need to change to meet the demands of online and more rapid peer-reviewed publication. The challenge in today’s world of increased electronic information is to ensure that the Journal captures the best experimental studies relating to plastic surgery. As such, the time to publication for articles in the Journal has been reduced over the past few years, but it remains prohibitively long for high-quality basic science papers. This drawback is compounded by the rapid time to publication in high-impact scientific journals. The Journal leadership recognizes the current approach is “not getting it done” in terms of attracting the very best experimental papers relating to plastic surgery, nd we are committed to making the Journal more competitive in the specific area of publishing high-quality experimental articles. The critical role of research in driving plastic surgery innovation is well known. The Journal must be seen as an attractive venue for publishing state-of-the-art experimental articles. High-impact science journals fully recognize the value of rapid publication and have increasingly evolved to promote it. Many of these journals publish articles in an advance online format shortly after a manuscript is accepted for publication. To make the Journal more competitive, we are implementing changes that are the first steps toward reducing the time to publication. Before electronic submission of manuscripts, it was not unusual for the initial review of an experimental paper to take 12 weeks. The Editor reviewed the comments and concerns from the reviewers and determined whether the manuscript should be rejected or sent back to the authors for revision. The manuscript could then be revised by the authors (or not), and the time to resubmission would vary depending on whether the authors needed to perform additional experiments and on how quickly they revised and resubmitted the manuscript. After the manuscript was resubmitted to the Journal, the Editor and reviewers would determine whether the revised manuscript was acceptable (or rejected). If so, the manuscript was often subsequently sent to a biostatistician (if appropriate) for review. The manuscript would then be returned to the authors to address the comments of the biostatistical review. The re-revised manuscript would then be submitted to the Journal and the Editor would ultimately determine whether or not the manuscript was accepted. The above description is generic and does not necessarily apply to all experimental papers. For example, manuscripts may be rejected at the initial submission or first revision or may require a second revision to address additional comments by the reviewers who reviewed the first revision. Rarely is an experimental paper (or any manuscript, for that matter) accepted without any revision. Once accepted, the time to publication ranges from approximately 8 to 13 months. However, the total time to publication (from initial submission of the manuscript until the article is published in the Journal) has been averaging 16 months. For state-of-the-art science papers, this is not an attractive situation. Consequently, many investigators send their “best work” to science journals that offer a more rapid review and a shorter time to publication. Given this scientific publishing landscape, the Journal is making changes to be not only more competitive but also in line and on par with other journals, such as Science and the New England Journal of Medicine. Compressing the overall submission, review, revision, and publication timeline to an absolute minimum is of paramount importance for Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery to become competitive in attracting upper-tier scientific papers. First, electronic submission through PRS’ enkwell (www.editorialmanager.com/prs) is expediting the time it takes for manuscripts to be reviewed. Theoretically, a manuscript can be submitted, seen by the Editor, assigned to reviewers, reviewed, and returned to the Editor for a first decision within a matter of days. In practice, although it takes approximately 3 to 4 weeks to review most manuscripts with the new enkwell system, the Editorial Office has already experienced a few situations in which scientific and clinical papers have been submitted and reviewed within a week’s time. Second, the Editorial Office is closely monitoring the status of each manuscript and sending reminders to reviewers to avoid prolonged review periods. The process of reminding tardy reviewers to complete their reviews has been made very efficient through the new electronic system. Third, reviewers can access manuscripts electronically for their review and submit the reviews electronically via PRS’ enkwell. In addition, reviewers now have greatly expanded flexibility in reviewing manuscripts. They can review a manuscript online, download a PDF file of a manuscript to their computer to review later, or print out a manuscript so that they can read the hard copy. Along with this flexibility, reviewers can write their reviews while linked to the Internet, or they can write them off-line and then upload their reviews later. Because electronically distributed manuscripts and figures are not returned to the Editorial Office, the reviewers spend much less clerical time and money on postage. Fourth, the biostatistical and statistical methodology review of manuscripts that need such scrutiny is being conducted from the beginning of the review process rather than at the end. These changes are being made in a continuing effort to make the Journal the best that it can be. Importantly, the Journal will continue to build on the incredible leadership of Dr. Robert Goldwyn over the past 25 years. While we have largely made these changes to attract high-quality experimental papers, we fully recognize that the rapid publishing of first-rate clinical articles will also be attractive to plastic surgeons. A second point to emphasize is that the changes made to reduce the time to publication via Advance Online on PRS’ Web site (www.plasreconsurg.org) do not mean that the reviews will be any less rigorous or different than they have been in the past. The review process will not be “watered down” and the overall bar for acceptance will not be lowered. A Description of PRS’ Advance Online PRS’ Advance Online provides rapid online publication of selected papers that have been recently accepted for publication that may have immediate implications for clinical practice or research. The articles in Advance Online have undergone the same rigorous peer review process as all other manuscripts submitted to the Journal, and the editors select the papers appearing in PRS’ Advance Online. Advance Online enables the Journal to publish papers online well ahead of their appearance in the printed version, thus greatly reducing publication times. Papers placed in Advance Online are available in a PDF format; the PDF is a provisional document that corresponds to the article as it appeared upon acceptance. The fully formatted PDF version will become available when the article is published in print. Appearance in Advance Online constitutes publication and establishes publication precedence. Articles in Advance Online can be cited as official references using the article’s unique digital object identifier, or DOI. What do these changes translate to for the Journal readership? We hope they lead to an increase in the quality of articles (experimental and clinical) that are published. Advance Online publication on the Journal’s Web site means that our readership will see state-of-the-art articles in a short period of time once they are accepted. The Journal believes this new pathway will potentially translate to a higher impact factor—one of the report cards that the Journal receives relative to other clinical and scientific journals. In addition, we hope to attract experimental papers from investigators who do not currently publish in the Journal. We are confident that the Journal readership will appreciate and value these changes. In addition to the more rapid review process and to PRS’ Advance Online, the following changes in the Journal will be forthcoming (some are already visible in this issue): Structured abstracts for all major clinical and scientific articles Highlighting of all abstracts in red, to make them more readable A Topical of Contents in addition to the standard of Contents A Preview of Contents that previews article titles in the coming month A streamlined Correspondence section, retitled “Letters and Viewpoints” Publication of more supplements on important topics What are the early returns on these changes? The changes implemented so far have reduced the time to publication. For example, an experimental paper submitted shortly after the electronic approach was instituted was reviewed, revised, and accepted in less than 10 weeks. It will be published electronically shortly after the first of the year with the inaugural issue of PRS’ Advance Online. As the online submission and review system becomes more familiar to authors and reviewers, even faster times will be realized. Thus, the total time to publication (from initial submission to online publication) can be shortened to approximately 6 to 8 weeks, depending largely on the time it takes for authors to revise their manuscripts. We hope to further accelerate this time to publication and are confident that scientists and clinicians will view the Journal as a more attractive venue for their state-of-the-art research.