Immediacy of information sharing is crucial in all scientific fields. If this information can be shared freely at no charge for authors and readers, we have the perfect formula to spread scientific information. After 3.5 years since first publication the Journal of Optometry is celebrating its increasingly relevant role within the visual science field with the launch of its EPub Ahead of Print service. Beyond the obvious benefits for the scientific community, this new feature reveals the maturity of the Journal of Optometry that has significantly increased the number of submissions.
With this feature, authors whose manuscripts have been accepted for publication will see their papers available for Open Access at the Journal's webpage within a period of 6 to 8 weeks instead of waiting for the next issue to be compiled in the on-line and printed version. Thus, immediacy will be much improved allowing authors to share with the community their most recent discoveries. A DOI (Digital Object Identifier) will allow authors and readers make reference to the published material even before a given paper assigned to an issue. This is expected to generate “revenues” for the Journal in terms of increasing citation indices but of course also benefits those authors that choose Journal of Optometry as their preferred destination to publish their research results and clinical experiences.
As shown in figure 1, during the past 3 years of publication, the average time from submission to publication has been of 6.5 months which comprises an average time for review process of 3.2 months and a similar time for the process of publication since acceptance. These values are in the same order of magnitude or even below the times reported by other well established journals in the fields of Optometry, Ophthalmology and Visual Science.
Average time from submission to acceptance (diamonds), acceptance to publication (squares) and submission to publication (triangles). Dashed lines represent the average for each data series. Epub Ahead of print data represents the projected time considering the new publication strategy.
With the new strategy of publication in electronic format as soon as the manuscript is accepted for publication we estimate that we will be able to cut by half the time since acceptance to publication, which will render an estimated record average time from submission to publication of less than 5 months.
With the invaluable collaboration of our Editorial Board Members, Reviewers and back-office team, we will continue doing any effort to evolve the Journal of Optometry to better satisfy the needs of authors and readers and ultimately transfer in a fluent and “immediate” way the scientific knowledge.
