Editorial

Veterinary Dermatology, already an online publication, went live for online submissions on 24th December 2004. You can visit the site and register at http://vetderm.edmgr.com. The electronic system will provide faster communication between authors, the Journal and reviewers, and decrease time to publication.

The system selected has facilities for checking figure quality and gives advice to correct problems. It will, in time, be able to automatically clean up references, not just styles (which are so tedious for authors) but also for correctness. Authors will be assisted with the production of their work and reviewer time will be saved by provision of instant on-line access to relevant papers. Conference abstracts and translations will be easier to input and there will be an integrated, seamless system from submission to publication (or rejection if Journal standards are not met). This will decrease total costs, despite the cost to set up the system and fees charged to the Journal for every manuscript which goes through the review process. Having struggled with version control manually, I shall be extremely glad to move to an electronically controlled system.

While appreciating that change is unsettling and uncomfortable it is also unavoidable and ultimately healthy. We ask for your patience as we all learn. It takes time to get everything right. We aim to maintain a personal communication style and to cater as far as possible for the needs of individual authors.

Included with online submission is a formal author agreement to replace the covering letter. Later this will be incorporated into the website. Articles need to be easily read on screen. Revised formatting instructions request sans serif type fonts and single line spacing. Keywords have been abandoned as modern search engines look for key phrases, particularly in the title and abstract. There is a correlation between online hits and subsequent citations for journal articles. Authors should include specific key phrases commonly used for searches in their subject area, focussing on a maximum of three or four different keyword phrases in an abstract. Over-repetition can also look like an attempt to trick the search engines and may result in a page being rejected. Blackwell, our publisher, aims to get your article cited so has a linking program with many abstracting and indexing databases and library sites. Their website is search-engine-friendly and titles of articles are in the highly valued heading positions on the page.

Whether we like it or not, we live in an age of electronic communication. This is a great opportunity as well as, with Open Access to the web, a threat to traditional forms of communication. The slide projector has disappeared from scientific meetings in as little as five years. Within a similar future time period, all journals may have electronic systems in a vibrant new publishing environment.

I want to be sure that during this period Veterinary Dermatology is a leader amongst veterinary journals in this environment I am confident that electronic publishing will reach an ever wider readership and achieve higher citation scores.

Finally, and most importantly, I am delighted that there are now three co-editors to assist in progressing manuscripts; Dr David McEwan Jenkinson, who has had a distinguished career in the basic science of skin, and two Board certified clinical and research dermatologists, Dr Peter Hill and Professor Rosanna Marsella. More about our new editors will be in the next issue.