Abstract
The New Year and the new volume of the Journal of Medical Biography bring an exciting development, which readers may already have noticed even before reading this editorial: an expansion in the page budget! In 2016 only, this increase will be from 62 to 72 pages per issue, reverting to 62 pages per issue in 2017.
The Journal has been very fortunate in recent years to have received large numbers of submissions of excellent manuscripts which have been deemed by peer review to be suitable for publication. This has demonstrated convincingly that there is a place, even a need, for such a journal, but the consequence has been a long delay – currently around two years – between acceptance of a paper and its appearance in print. Understandably, some authors have found this delay irksome, although the advent of Online First following the transfer of publisher to SAGE has meant that papers have appeared online sooner, in many cases within a few weeks of acceptance, and with a Digital Object Identifier (doi) which allows them to be cited. Other steps to tackle the backlog were initiated during the editorship of Dr Christopher Gardner-Thorpe, including reorganisation of page layouts, which has afforded a little more space for articles, and revision of the author guidelines to reduce the desired length of articles, which may also speed the publication process. Clearly such changes take time to work through the system.
It would be wrong to anticipate that the increased page count per issue will solve all the backlog issues, but certainly it should help. Change in editorial policy is not envisaged, such that the rejection rate of papers is anticipated to stay around its current figure of 50%. This means, sadly, that some good manuscripts may be turned away and authors disappointed, but the corollary is, hopefully, that readers will continue to enjoy a very high standard of original informative articles in the Journal.