| “FAST HEART”
There is one problem all editors of scientific
journals encounter—how to get important material published quickly. We have
overcome this to some extent by introducing
Online First which has now been running successfully on the journal’s
website since March 2005. This allows a paper to be published and citable
within two weeks of acceptance but it does not speed up the review process
which is hampered by the general inertia of the system, in particular the
time it takes to get reviews returned.
To counter this Heart is introducing a new
feature: "Rapid Communications". These articles will be a little shorter
than the average full paper, and are intended for scientific results that
are of particular importance and merit rapid publication.
By accelerating and personalising the
review process we aim to accept a Rapid Communication for publication within
four weeks and publish it Online First within the following week; it will
appear in the next print version of the journal to be produced after the
acceptance date. This very rapid process will depend on immediate responses
from reviewers, and a rapid turnaround from authors once they have received
their paper for revision.
We anticipate that we may be overwhelmed
with requests for this type of publication unless we only process those
papers that are recognisable as having great merit at first sight. Clearly
if everybody asks for this service nobody will get it! The main safeguard is
that if the paper is clearly unsuitable as a Rapid Communication because it
does not satisfy the criterion of being outstandingly important, it will be
returned to the authors unprocessed within 48 hours.
Rapid Communications will be open for
business from 15th May 2006 and we hope that we will see a healthy number of
important papers coming through this route.
Roger Hall
Editor, Heart |
