Note: This article excerpts content from the January 2016 CHEST editorial (Irwin RS, Welch SJ, Rice J, French CT. Spread the word about CHEST in 2016: An ever-rising impact factor, content innovations, launching a new partnership with Elsevier, and protecting the name and legacy of the journal. Chest. 2016;149(1):1-6).

Since its inception in 1935, CHEST had been self-published by the American College of Chest Physicians. Starting this month, January 2016, CHEST has chosen to work in partnership with Elsevier as its publisher. While CHEST will maintain editorial control over the journal, this partnership will allow us to grow the reach and awareness of the journal, provide world class data reporting and trend analysis, increase our outreach for the best clinical research in the field, and provide a competitive business backbone to increase our support for the CHEST organization. We are confident that the global footprint of Elsevier, its Science Direct and Clinical Key content delivery platforms, and its commitment to attracting the best clinical science for the journal, will provide the resources for CHEST to continue to evolve, innovate, and bring our readers the most relevant, cutting-edge content to help them provide the best patient care every minute of every day. Please join us in celebrating a new relationship that we believe will benefit our readers, our parent CHEST organization and its membership, and our new business partner, Elsevier.

Elsevier Content Innovations and Benefits for Authors and Readers

Some exciting new content innovations will be available to CHEST authors and readers through Elsevier’s Science Direct platform.

These will include (1) a virtual microscope that will allow authors to submit high-resolution figures that can be viewed and zoomed in to great detail not previously possible (Fig 1);

Fig. 1: Example of a viewing a figure with the virtual microscope.

(2) interactive case reports that will allow us to modify case-based sections like Pearls and Chest Imaging so that the reader has to select the right answer from multiple choices; (3) multimedia audio slide summaries that will allow authors to record up to a 5-minute audio file, with slides, that summarizes their paper; and (4) interactive 3-D radiologic imaging that will allow conversion of images to an interactive 3-D model (Fig 2).

These innovations will be implemented throughout 2016, and instructions on how to use them have been added to our Instructions to Authors, which can be found at: http://journal.publications.chestnet.org/ss/forauthors.aspx

We are actively assessing other innovations that may be implemented at a later date. A list and description of the content innovations discussed above, as well as ones we are considering, can be found at:

https://www.elsevier.com/books-and-journals/content-innovation#list.

Fig. 2: Example of new interactive 3-D radiologic imaging for figures.

In addition, the partnership with Elsevier will allow for a number of benefits to authors and readers. First of all, we will no longer charge authors for submission of color figures. We believe this will enhance the visual appeal of articles and provide more clarity when looking at data plots and graphs, as color will be easier to discern than gray scale. In addition, Elsevier teams will redraw figures and use color in graphs and charts where appropriate to create consistency in the look and feel of the journal, improving readability and data interpretation by the reader. Second, Elsevier will provide an author dashboard, so that the author can see information about their article, such as citation statistics and bibliometrics, as well as usage and downloads. And, in order to facilitate wider dissemination of our correspondence, we are moving that section from an online-only status and putting it back into the print journal, as well as online. We are excited to offer all of these services to our authors and readers.

We want to assure our authors that all of these content innovations and benefits will be free of charge!

Innovation is not new for CHEST. A blog on The Scholarly Kitchen, written by Kent Anderson, noted “One frequent design challenge for both print and online is to make multimedia content more apparent to online users. The Chest redesign is notable in this regard, as the editorial explaining it carefully demonstrates how to access video, audio, and data options around articles. It reads like an instruction manual, which is not a criticism. Change has to be handled carefully, and most journals (and organizations in general) under-communicate changes and benefits to their customers. On the strategic front, the Chest redesign is geared to providing more online-only content, a strong trend among journals, especially as print advertising continues a slow and steady decline.” http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2014/07/07/the-journal-redesign-more-complicated-more-costly-and-more-strategic-than-ever/

We would be remiss if we didn’t thank you, our readers, members, authors, contributors, and peer reviewers, for the important roles you play in ensuring the success of our efforts to provide the best clinical content to the CHEST readership. Thank you for your ongoing support and contributions to CHEST.

Changing the Publishing Paradigm of CHEST