a new deal – ten times better
As the College’s Journal prepares to relaunch, Professor Robert Steele outlines the exciting options available to Members and Fellows under the new publishing arrangement
"Another option will be to stop receiving the paper version of The Surgeon but to have electronic access to the Journal along with a bundle of 10 other health sciences journals"
Other Surgeons' Hall articles:
Professor Alec Eremin, the last editor of the Journal of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh did three important things during his editorship; he changed the name of the Journal, he initiated the process whereby the Journal became the joint property of the Royal Colleges of Surgeons of Edinburgh and Ireland and, most importantly, he worked tirelessly to improve the profile and the impact of the Journal. When Professor Eremin stepped down as Editor-in-Chief his shoes were amply filled by Professor Austin Leahy of the Irish College, who has continued to enhance the Journal. As the ‘Edinburgh Editor’, I feel greatly honoured to have the opportunity to contribute to this process.
During Professor Eremin’s editorship, the Journal was published in-house and for many years this has worked extremely well thanks, latterly, to the tremendous efforts of Mr Mark Baillie and his team in the publications office. It has become increasingly clear, however, that in-house publication cannot compete with the influence of, and the technology available to, the large publishing houses and after a prolonged and detailed process a new publishing relationship has been established with Elsevier Ltd taking over as publisher of The Surgeon in January 2010.
The aim of The Surgeon is to improve its national and international recognition and thereby improve its impact factor by focusing on the publication of excellent surgical and dental research. In parallel with this aim is a commitment to education as evidenced by increased publication of review articles by internationally recognised experts.
The new arrangements with Elsevier will bring many advantages. The Surgeon will now appear on the ScienceDirect platform (www.sciencedirect.com) and this will raise the profile of the Journal, ensuring that it is available to a much wider audience than before. This will inevitably increase citations and have a favourable effect on the impact factor. The online version of The Surgeon will have full text searching and automatic reference linking to other journals in addition to inclusion on PubMed/Medline. All the back issues of The Surgeon from 2003 will be available on ScienceDirect in the near future.
Submissions to The Surgeon are now being handled by the Elsevier electronic submission system available at http://ees.elsevier.com/surge, and this will greatly facilitate the editorial process, markedly reducing the time between article submission to a final decision being taken. Once a paper has been accepted for publication it will be available electronically within a few weeks, even before it has been assigned to a specific journal issue.
The members and fellows of both Colleges will have two enhanced options in terms of subscribing to the Journal. Firstly, they may choose to continue to receive the paper version of the Journal and have full access to the electronic version (and the back issues) on ScienceDirect via the Colleges’ websites. Another option will be to stop receiving the paper version of The Surgeon but to have electronic access to the Journal along with a bundle of 10 other health sciences journals that are currently published by Elsevier (see below). While it is likely that the majority of our fellows and members will continue to opt for the paper version, there is an increasing demand for enhanced electronic access and we very much hope that our members and fellows will avail themselves of this excellent opportunity. Surgical trainees associated with both the Edinburgh and Irish colleges will also benefit from the new arrangements as they will have automatic electronic access to The Surgeon via the Colleges’ websites.
Finally, the Editorial Board has worked intensively with Elsevier in recent months in order to ensure continuation of an attractive layout for the Journal and although readers will see some changes, we are confident that no one will be disappointed. Our web address remains the same (www.surgeon.net) and both the Editorial Board and Elsevier are intent on building on all our previous efforts to produce a journal in which you will be proud to publish your work.
The bundle of 10 Elsevier e-journals on offer to Fellows and Members who opt-out of receiving the print edition of The Surgeon:
- Surgery
- Surgical Oncology
- International Journal of Surgery
- Clinical Neurology and Neurosurgery
- Journal of Dentistry
- Injury
- Current Anaesthesia and Critical Care
- Best Practice and Research Clinical Gastroenterology
- Seminars in Fetal and Neonatal Medicine
- International Journal of Cardiology
Professor Robert Steele
Editor, The Surgeon