It was with great pleasure that I accepted to join Garth Warnock as Coeditor-in-Chief of the Canadian Journal of Surgery. Over the last 50 years, CJS has seemed to stand the test of time. Seminal articles, particularly in a Canadian context, have found their place in the journal. There really is no better place for uniquely Canadian research in surgery to be published. But, just existing is not our mandate going forward. We as editors also realize that there can be change brought to the journal to particularly meet the demands of our readership. We hope for the journal to grow and become a better product in order to address these needs.
As such, you can see the new look the journal has adopted as we have reworked the esthetics and some of the mechanisms of the journal. We hope to bring more change for the betterment of the content and to ensure some added value to the reader. Our new method of electronic submission has proven literally overwhelming to the staff. We believed that we were missing important publication opportunities by not being online. It is an arduous task to submit, review and revise on paper. Since the switch, submissions have spiked to an average of 45 per month compared with 18 per month a year ago, with little advertisement of the new process. Our average turnaround time to first review has decreased by 64%. In the past, the turnaround time has been the major criticism of the journal. This should be more than rectified with the new system. We will be bringing in a new organizational structure to the editorial executive committee and adding a new enlarged editorial review board to ensure timely responses to the authors. We expect to move more of the non–peer reviewed material online, allowing more peer reviewed science to be published in a timely fashion in the printed version. Better science in the journal means more relevant information for everyone.
Of course not all changes are positive and we, as with the rest of the country, are dealing with economic difficulties at all levels. Companies we traditionally rely upon to fund the journal may have difficulty continuing the same level of support. Even our national specialty societies have been having difficulty guaranteeing continued support. We will have to work through these problems as they present themselves. However, other positive changes are in the plans, including branding lectures of interest from our major national meetings. These would be published in the journal as reviews. Also, we would like to prioritize uniquely Canadian research. Canadian researchers continue to win national awards and produce some of the most thought-provoking and paradigm-changing science in the world. By promoting these authors, we hope to allow the journal to continue to showcase Canadian research — clinical and basic — as it has for the last 50 years.
Footnotes
Competing interests: None declared.