A New Look and Continued Growth for JGIM
William M. Tierney, MD
1
and Martha S. Gerrity, MD, PhD
2
1
Indiana University School of Medicine, Regenstrief Institute, Inc., Room M200-OPW, Wishard Memorial Hospital, 1001 West Tenth Street,
Indianapolis, IN 46202, USA;
2
Oregon Health & Science University, Portland VA Medical Center, Portland, OR 46202, USA.
DOI: 10.1007/s11606-006-0070-7
© 2007 Society of General Internal Medicine 2007;22:157–159
T
his issue begins JGIM’s 22nd year and the half-way point
of our 5-year tenure as Coeditors. This issue also ushers
in a number of changes in JGIM, some dramatic, some subtle,
and all representing progress in JGIM as a respected peer-
reviewed journal. The most obvious and dramatic change is
the cover. In consultation with our Deputy Editors and
Editorial Board, we have chosen an eye-catching, radically
redesigned cover that reflects the dynamic nature of JGIM and
the field of general internal medicine.
NEW PUBLISHER
JGIM’s new look is predicated on its changing publishers. After
11 very productive years with Blackwell Science, JGIM is now
being published by Springer, the world’s second largest
publisher of medicine, science, and technology journals and
books. We are excited about our 5-year contract with Springer
that brings both increased financial support for the Society of
General Internal Medicine (SGIM) and JGIM editorial office as
well as enhanced access to Springer’s many features. Those
which we feel will be particularly appealing to JGIM authors
and readers include:
&
SpringerLink,
1
the online portal to JGIM. SpringerLink is
accessed by 6,700 individual institutional libraries and an
additional 4,000 libraries that participate in 344 library
consortia. Besides JGIM, SpringerLink contains online
archives of more than 1,500 journals. We are excited that
Springer will be digitizing and archiving all 21 prior
volumes of JGIM; subscribers will thus have access to all
published material from JGIM since its inception in 1986.
&
SpringerAlert
2
allows anyone (even nonsubscribers) to
receive alerts from JGIM and any other Springer journals
free of charge. This service—accessible through Spring-
erLink—can be customized to provide readers with the
latest publications on topics of their choosing.
&
Open access: Authors, readers, and funding agencies are
increasingly expecting journals to provide open access to
journal content. Because articles’ commercial value is in
the timeliness of the content, Springer will provide the
author_s final accepted manuscript of all JGIM articles to
the National Library of Medicine’sPubMedCentral
12 months after their publication. Because the number of
libraries with access to JGIM’s content is more than double
its number of individual subscribers, open access to
JGIM’s online content dramatically increases reading by
clinicians, educators, and investigators—the latter two
resulting in an enhanced Impact Factor.
3
Open access also
increases reading of JGIM articles by the lay public and lay
media, further disseminating the authors’ work. Impor-
tantly, we have immediate free access to up to 24 articles
per year that the Editors feel are so important that broad
free access is desirable.
&
Online First™: In 2005, JGIM began article-based publish-
ing
4
, a process where we submit an article to the publisher
upon acceptance which is then immediately typeset and
proofread. Once approved by the authors, the article is
published online and is accessible through PubMed
5
as
“ePub ahead of print.” Thus, 6 weeks after acceptance, an
article is available to the public in its final format. Springer
will continue this process in its Online First feature
available through SpringerLink.
&
Case reports and clinical vignettes: In the past, due to
restrictions in the page budget for JGIM, only the abstracts
were printed for case reports and clinical vignettes. The full
formatted article was available online. However, Springer
has increased our page budget substantially and commit-
ted to publishing all of the manuscripts deemed acceptable
by the Deputy Editors. Therefore, beginning with this
issue, we will publish full case reports and clinical vign-
ettes in both the paper and online versions of JGIM.
&
Online appendices: At no charge to JGIM or its authors,
Springer will allow authors to post appendices on Spring-
erLink that they feel add value to their articles. While we
expect most appendices to be textual (for example, an
article describing implementation of a new curriculum
could include the entire curriculum as an online appen-
dix), they could include digital images, audio (MP3) files, or
video (MPEG) files. We hope authors take full advantage of
this feature to markedly increase the amount of valuable
material JGIM publishes.
&
Author alerts: Through Springer_s arrangement with
Thompson Scientific
6
, ISI will send an e-mail alert to
authors when their work is cited by others.
&
Color: JGIM can now publish 42 articles per year (three to
four per issue) with color figures and/or illustrations at no
charge. This will boost the visual appeal and readability of
JGIM content.
&
Blogs: Springer is initiating this new feature for which
JGIM will be its first medical journal. Although we will still
publish Letters to the Editor in the paper version of JGIM,
we will also establish an online web-log (“blog”) for each
article and work to actively engage authors and readers in
discussions about the contents of JGIM articles and their
Published online January 20, 2007
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