Contemporary changes in medical science and scientific publishing practices are hard to understand and even harder to follow. In the past it was enough to talk about “medicine” and “announces”/papers written by an author-researcher-doctor. Today one can easily claim that there are constellations of medical fields and publishing practices and still, not describe the reality.
The complexity is now obvious in every aspect of publishing. One can find pure electronic (e)-journals, printed (p)-journals, p-e journals or p+e journals. Open access journals, Hybrid model journals, Journals under subscription, scholarly and commercial journals1. Which is better? The content varies also from plain text to interactive info-graphics; from liberal flow to strict regulatory documents. If someone adds to the aforementioned the dilemma “Peer review or interactive publishing without editors”2, the fact that publishing process itself uses a lot of product marketing plans, that the authors could be medical doctors, but also medical writers, medical translators or medical journalists or…”ghosts”; then, he gets an idea of the networks hidden under a published paper3.
And unfortunately, that’s only the surface. If the form/type of the article and the presentation/language of the information in it are significant; importance of its content is crucial. Almost sixty years after the invention of “impact factor”, its’ now more obvious than ever than bibliometrics indices are not scientometrics indices and than scientometrics indices are not necessarily metrics of importance4-8.
Within this framework, modification and “modernization” of the current journal is a dynamic process. Our last change was, obtaining digital object identifying (DOI) number, and adopting NISO practices for the presentation and identification of e-journals9. Others are either in stage of integration or under evaluation.
No matter what changes occurred or will occur the key of publishing remains the same: a form of dialogue among colleges, communication for sharing experiences and ideas. That’s why, we welcome everyone who is willing to contribute to this effort; both in front (authors/readers) or behind (reviewers/editorial board members) the scene.
For the Editorial Board,
Theodoros Aslanidis
Assistant Editor.
