Abstract
The British Journal of Occupational Therapy has had a historical basis in being published in monthly issues. The current strategy has emerged from previous developments which have seen it move from being an ‘in-house’ publication, through to having a formalised editorial board, and then becoming part of a publishing group (Sage Publications). This background demonstrates that the publishing landscape is rarely static, and changes need to be made from time to time to remain relevant and up-to-date. This Editorial provides information about the next such change in the interests of the journal remaining as transparent about our processes and direction as possible.
We wish to reassure you that it will remain the journal you know and love, with hopefully minimal impact on how you interact with its contents. We anticipate that these changes will modernise how the journal operates and presents the work we publish. Over the last couple of years we have made many similar ‘tweaks’ to editorial policies, such as our recent introduction of Patient and Public Involvement data in articles.
There are many different models of journal publishing. We are sure you have noticed that in recent years increasing numbers of journals have become an online-only publication. This has moved publication away from the traditional print model, partly in response to concerns over the impact on the environment, and print being seen as increasingly obsolete with falling circulation as readers choose to access research digitally. BJOT has stuck largely to the print-publication model, curating a monthly printed issue which anyone has the option of purchasing while RCOT members receive an online-only subscription as part of their membership. While our print circulation is relatively low compared to our online engagement, we do see its value to those who choose to receive it.
This traditional way of doing things, however, has led to us becoming increasingly out of step with how the majority of our readers are accessing and engaging with our articles. In this model, our articles are published shortly after being accepted on our ‘Online First’ page, where anyone with access can read and cite the research straight away. Articles remain on this page until they are included in a print issue, when they move into the relevant volume and issue. This separation of articles can be confusing. In recent years, having a fixed number of ‘pages’ to ensure a consistently sized monthly print issue has meant that articles may spend many months ‘Online First’ before being assigned their final print citation, meaning the print issue no longer contains the latest and most cutting-edge articles. Fixed monthly page budgets are also one limiting factor in how many articles we can publish overall. This is increasingly outdated in a largely digital world, and it no longer makes sense to build our editorial policies around the printed page.
What we have decided at BJOT, in collaboration with our publisher Sage, is to move to a ‘flexible page budget’ model. This removes the monthly page requirements that we currently work within, where we assign articles to issues of a defined size. Instead, articles will publish into the next available issue and issues will be flexible in size – some may be smaller, some larger, depending on what articles are accepted and when. This gives the editorial team flexibility to focus on how we can work with authors to review and improve their research content, by reducing the administration involved in curating fixed-size print issues. It will also mean a significantly shorter time between acceptance and ‘final’ publication, which will benefit many authors who rely on their final citation for career advancement.
What this will mean in practice, is that the journal, starting from now, will be publishing several ‘bumper’ issues to clear our current backlog before officially moving to our new way of working. If you receive a monthly issue ToC for BJOT, you might notice this is considerably longer than usual. However, we do not anticipate that the changes will have a dramatic effect on how the journal looks or operates. We will not lose control of the careful editorial curation that we have now. Our 2020 strategy (Lambert, 2020) to raise the levels of evidence published in BJOT, and our strategy regarding increasing the quality of published review articles (Unsworth, 2020) are both still in place and form the backbone of editorial decisions made at the article level. Flexibility to publish more articles one month does not mean being indiscriminate in what we publish – only that we have the space to publish every high-quality article that we receive and are less limited by page counts. We also retain ultimate control over special issues, editorials and all other types of content.
We welcome all feedback on our journal and encourage you to send any queries as always to
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Contributorship
AJ and RL wrote and edited the manuscript.
Patient and public involvement data
During the development, progress, and reporting of the submitted research, Patient and Public Involvement in the research was: Not included at any stage of the research.