<i>JRSM Short Reports</i> – a new online sister journal to <i>JRSM</i>
Authors: Kamran Abbasi
Journal: Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine (2010)

The world of journals is transforming before our eyes. Open access journals like those from the Public Library of Medicine and BioMed Central are attracting more submissions, and turning a speculative publishing model into a successful one. More and more research and case reports will be published in online-only publications that are open access and, importantly, ask authors to pay a publication fee. These journals are meeting the needs of authors and readers. Demand for publication in such journals has risen.

Increasingly, successful journals will publish added value content like editorials, clinical reviews and other educational pieces in their print editions while publishing original research on their websites. The world must have changed if even The Lancet, flagship of sceptical publishing powerhouse Elsevier, now declares itself to be an ‘open-access journal’.

Of course, there remains a role for traditional print journals, like the JRSM, but print journals will need to be much smarter about how they meet the clinical and educational needs of their readers.

We already receive far more articles, especially original research and case reports, than the JRSM can publish. The journal's rejection rate is in the region of 80%. Hence there is a demand for publishing in an RSM journal but at present we cannot accommodate everybody – nor should we – in the print edition. That means we reject many hundreds of well-written and methodologically sound manuscripts that simply aren't of sufficient interest or relevance to enough JRSM readers.

Our research, both a survey of authors of rejected papers and last year's RSM members’ survey, indicate that authors would welcome the opportunity of publishing in an open-access version of the JRSM. This research fits with our own sense of the way medical journals are changing.

Later this year we will launch a new online-only, open-access publication called JRSM Short Reports. The online submission site will be up and running shortly, but you can submit your papers now to me, ready for launch. JRSM Short Reports will publish articles in any specialty and from any country. It will be a peer-reviewed journal with the focus on the relevance of the research question to the target audience that the paper was intended for, the reliability of the methods, and any important omissions.

The peer-review process itself will mirror that of the JRSM with an editor initially evaluating the paper, immediately rejecting unsuitable papers, and sending the rest for expert review. The difference in emphasis, however, is that while with the JRSM we seek to only publish articles of interest to a broad range of UK clinicians, JRSM Short Reports will publish articles of interest to almost any reader interested in improving patient care.

Our editorial view is that readers can decide for themselves whether or not an article has value or relevance to them, and this is the way that the Internet has transformed publication of all kinds. Print publication, because of space limitations, forces decisions on editors based on their judgement of what's of interest to readers. Online publication allows readers to decide what's of interest to them.

Accepted articles will go through a light technical editing process although authors will have to conform to our technical and production requirements when they submit the final version for publication. We will require articles to be shorter than 3000 words, 30 references and 4 tables/figures.

We will charge a fee for publication, and this is being calculated at the moment. The fee covers the processing and production charge for the manuscript, and crucially makes the article freely available to all from the moment of publication (open access). In addition, we will offer a fee waiver to authors from the world's poorest countries in accordance with best journal practice and the HINARI definition.

Our advice from the National Library of Medicine in the USA, is that the articles published in JRSM Short Reports can be immediately included in PubMed Central, and full indexing in Medline can follow within months. Articles published online in JRSM Short Reports will also be listed in the print edition of the JRSM. Indeed, we will continue to publish the papers of broadest interest in the JRSM, and you shouldn't notice any difference in this publication.

Our view is that this is the right time and right focus to start a new journal that champions an open-access model. We expect that JRSM Short Reports will better meet the needs of more authors and more readers than we can achieve through JRSM alone.

We do hope you will support this exciting new initiative.