Early crops.

"In the garden, Autumn is, indeed the crowning glory of the year, bringing us the fruition of months of thought and care and toil." Rose G Kingsley, The Autumn Garden, 1905

This month, I am pleased to announce 2 important changes that mark the "crowning glory" of our initial efforts to move PTJ forward. First, we have a new Web site. The URL remains the same--www.ptjournal.org--but we are now on the HighWire Press platform, where we join such prestigious journals as JAMA, New England Journal of Medicine, BMJ, and Annals of Internal Medicine. A division of the Stanford University Libraries, HighWire Press has been developing journal Web sites for more than 10 years and currently hosts the largest repository of free, full-text, peer-reviewed content, with more than 900 journals and more than 1 million free, full-text articles online. Of the 200 most frequently cited journals, 71 are hosted by HighWire Press.

Our new Web home provides both quick and advanced searching, a mechanism for readers to remark online about the articles that they've just read ("rapid responses"), article archives beginning with the January 1990 issue (we plan to add articles from the 1980s within the year), links to PubMed and ISI Web of Science, and content alerts that readers can customize to meet their needs and interests. We also will now have the capability to post supplemental data--including raw data, image series, and appendixes that are too large to publish in print--and to offer "value-added" content such as patient videos and podcasts.

Perhaps most important, our new Web site allows us to publish articles ahead of print (HighWire Press calls it "P<P"). To start, we will post a few selected high-impact articles. For authors, the benefit is clear: your work is disseminated as soon as it is accepted for publication. For researchers, you get a head's up on data that may be useful to you in your own work. For clinicians, you get to read the latest information without having to wait for editing and the "fancy" page composition that precedes final print publication. Look for the first "P<P" article later this month!

The other significant change is that we have moved to a 2-tiered peer-review system. Our previous process had 3 steps: review by 2 experts, summary and recommendation by an Editorial Board member, and final decision by an editor. In our new system, each manuscript is still reviewed by 2 experts, but final decision is rendered by the Editorial Board member. This streamlined procedure was developed to reduce the time from submission to publication and to reduce the amount of extra feedback to the authors but at the same time retain a high level of quality and constructiveness in our reviews.

In this month's PT Magazine, you are introduced to our fabulous editors and Editorial Board. Read about the team that is working so very hard behind the scenes to provide you with meaningful, timely content. Please join me in welcoming them.

The PTJ editors are heading up committees that are looking at every aspect of the Journal, from editorial policies to reporting of statistical data to the way we categorize manuscripts. Michael Mueller, PT, PhD, FAPTA--our former editor for Updates who worked so tirelessly on behalf of the Journal from 1995 until he rotated off the board this summer--has agreed to help us refine our approach to Perspectives and Updates, manuscript categories that are very popular with readers but that need some fine-tuning.

The editors and I would love to chat online with you about this early crop of changes and about any other topic relevant to PTJ. Visit www.ptjournal.org to find out exactly when and how!

Rebecea L Craik, PT, PhD, FAPTA 

Editor in Chief

[e-mail]

[DOI: 10.2522/ptj.2006.86.9. 1186]