I am happy to announce the opportunity for online-only publication of papers in the European Journal of Cardio-thoracic Surgery. As a direct result of the increasing number of high-quality papers being submitted, the time taken for articles to be published has increased significantly in recent years. In order to improve the time to publication of accepted papers, we are providing a limited number of electronic pages for online-only publication. Authors now have the opportunity to choose between these two possibilities, i.e. to have the paper published in electronic or printed format.
Online-only papers will be published as paginated, fully citable articles in line with all other papers. All papers (printed and online-only) are processed in the same way, i.e. they are submitted electronically and undergo the same review process.
The advantages of online-only publication are a significant reduction in waiting times from acceptance to publication, and an increase in the number of citable Journal pages for publication of Editorials, Original Articles, Case Reports, Images and Letters to the Editor, and other material online. This will, in turn, speed up the translation of surgical innovations [1] and will also allow ‘hot topics’ to be communicated more rapidly [2,3]. Online-only publication has been available for many years in other Journals in our field and is well accepted by the authors.
Online-only articles will be listed in the Table of Contents of a printed issue (Fig. 1 ) and will be identified by an ‘e-only’ sign. The abstract will appear in the usual indexing databases – PubMed/MEDLINE, Scopus, EMBASE, Index MEDICUS, and other indexing services. Online-only articles can be sent at an earlier stage to PubMed, allowing more rapid communication to readers. The European Journal of Cardio-thoracic Surgery is available online at http://ejcts.ctsnetjournals.org and http://www.sciencedirect.com.
This symbol will indicate e-only articles in the Table of Contents. Online-only papers are accessible to journal subscribers at http://ejcts.ctsnetjournals.org and http://www.sciencedirect.com.
This symbol will indicate e-only articles in the Table of Contents. Online-only papers are accessible to journal subscribers at http://ejcts.ctsnetjournals.org and http://www.sciencedirect.com.
I expect that online-only publication will grow rapidly with time, and I would like to invite all readers to comment on this new feature of the European Journal of Cardio-thoracic Surgery.
