2013 is a year of change for The Journal of Visual Communication in Medicine. For some years now the delivery of the journal has been via both a quarterly printed edition and an online version featuring a downloadable PDF document. We are now in an era in which the demand for online resources has increased and many scientific journals have responded to this. As an example, the Lancet series of journals now offers an annual subscription featuring a printed version, an online version, and a version for IPad. An IPad or android version of our journal is hopefully not too large an ambition, but such a development is not something we could currently fund, so our changes in 2013 will focus on the printed edition and the online resource.
The direction these changes will take was concluded following a collaboration between the editorial board, the Informa production team and a working group comprising members of the IMI Council and the journal's past and present editors. We took into account accessibility of the journal, the historical background to the publication, the financial implications of proposed changes, and ensuring that any change would involve improving on the production quality to provide a better journal for both our readers and our authors.
We are a niche scientific publication, but one in which image, design and style hold significant importance. Historically we have maintained the standards of a traditional medical journal and we want this to continue, but also work towards fusing the two elements that our journal works to promote. We can then produce a publication that wholly represents the breadth of the professional skills possessed by our readership and one that promotes visual communication in medicine by demonstrating how the two can combine effectively.
So 2013 will see an improved online resource where we can better accommodate multi-media and video submissions, allow better communication features and an easy-to-access online version of the printed journal. We will promote early online publication so that as soon as a paper is ready it will be published online, which will be a great incentive to our authors. But before those changes take place we have also worked hard in developing the new format of the printed version, which will now be dispatched twice a year, in May and November. Each issue will feature a new-look, full-colour edition. This will fulfil a long-held ambition, offering the capability of publishing all papers with full-colour illustration, thus allowing authors the opportunity to showcase the very best in visual communication at the very highest quality.
We hope you enjoy the changes we have made – feedback is important to the evolving process and we welcome all questions or comments, so please send these in to the Editor at
Editor