Abstract :
When we started on 13 years ago as an electronic journal, there were only few such journals worldwide which were pub-lished in electronic only version. None of them were from Middle East. Today the electronic publishing has become more popular and the number of electronic only journals is escalating. The ease of this type of publication as compared to the hard copies, the lower costs, the much higher visibility and the speed of dissemination of the information have all made this type of publication attractive. As was said by Kassier 20 years ago, the purpose of medical journalism should be revealing not suppressing the informa-tion.1 This is more plausible with elec-tronic publication. The electronic publica-tion makes the data more revealing and more accessible. This is of utmost impor-tance for busy physicians who need in-formation in timely manner during medi-cal care or for health professionals work-ing in the developing countries with lim-ited access to standard libraries.
However electronic publication has its own challenges. Still many authors prefer to publish in hard copy journals, because they think it is more prestigious with higher chance of reputation. This results in more paucity of the high quality origi-nal articles in the electronic journals. In Shiraz Electronic Medical Journal (SEMJ) this was the case at beginning in the first 5-6 years. It took time to get the trust of the researchers to publish in this elec-tronic journal. As the journal became in-dexed in well known international in-dexes like Scopus and many others (now indeed the journal is indexed in more than 50 databases and sites) the flow of the article increased dramatically. As the quality of original article papers are in-creasing, our early rejection rate has de-creased dramatically. Currently we dis-card near 50% of received papers mostly due to our fixed number of articles per issue based on the policy of the supervi-sory committee of the research journals
at Iranian Ministry of Health and Medical
Education.
The late and tardy response of reviewers
is another challenge. Though this is not
only for the electronic journals but it
seems to be more prominent here. I had
experience of being editor-in-chief in
both electronic and hard copy journals
and I can say at least some reviewers
take the peer review request form the
electronic journals less seriously than the
same request from the old fashion journals.
The electronic publication provides
many more opportunities and capabilities
to the publisher than the hard copies,
including better search options, use of
multimedia and more colourful and detailed
illustrations and presentation of the
full data sets .2 At SEMJ, we are planning
to take advantage of the latest technology
to catch up with today’s epublication.
We believe these will make
our journal more readable and more informative.
One should not forget that
these capabilities can not replace the
originality and validity of the scientific
articles.
Electronic publication also has the challenge
of having stable, secure and easily
accessible internet servers and management
system including the essential
space for archives with a stable address.
We faced this problem at beginning but
with strengthened infrastructures in our
institution the problem have been lessened
to a great extent. Some journals
may use the commercial servers, but the
problem of stability and cost are of concern.
We have been using the commercial
service providers for mirroring and to
increase our visibility but for the sake of
stability our main site is hosted by the
server of our institution, Shiraz University
of Medical Sciences and we found
this policy of importance to have a continuous
uniform presentation in the web.
Another advantage of online publication
is easier editorial tasks, especially with
the use of an integrated publication program.
Through this program the editors
can manage and monitor the whole process
of peer review and publication with
much ease, better quality, fast speed and
lower costs. Monitoring of pattern of
online use can also give the editors a
view of the readers’ choice, for instance,
through monitoring the number of visitors
to each article.
One of the challenges in the past was
how to cite an article form an electronic
journal. This is now standardized but still
there are some pitfalls. Indeed online
citation with a direct link to the cited articles
has made the online citation more
effective.
Despite of all advantages of electronic
publication, one should remember the
importance of differentiating between
peer reviewed and ‘gray articles’. Besides,
there are some futile electronic
journals which are not using standard
protocols in peer review and editing. This
has produced a mass of large information
in the net without scientific basis which
could be misleading to some readers,
especially nonprofessionals. These sites
have polluted the environment of electronic
publication. One of the reasons of
less desire to publish in electronic journals
might be related to this environment.
Absolute adherence to standard
peer review process is the only way to
avoid this hazard. Current appearance of
the standard electronic journals in the well monitored indexes is a good criterion for distinction of those unscientific jour-nals from standard ones.
In conclusion, electronic publication has expanded in past decade with an enor-mous rate. There would be much more electronic publications in coming years. The lessons learned in establishment of journals like ours, might help others to have a better organization of electronic publication. The organizations devoted to medical and scientific publication should have more pivotal role in this regards.
