We are excited to introduce a new design for JEM.
With the aim to increase the quality of the service offered to our authors, JEM has undergone many changes in the past year (see Nathan et al. 2017. J. Exp. Med. https://doi.org/10.1084/jem.20162116). New academic editors were added to our board in an ongoing effort to better reflect the broad scope of JEM. Representation of women on both academic and advisory editorial boards is now nearly 30%, and we will continue to increase this. We introduced the Technical Advances format to bring readers cutting-edge approaches that they can incorporate into their research. We’ve made the editorial process easier on authors by allowing transfer of reviewers’ comments from other journals, reducing our time to online publication, introducing an immediate open access option, and bringing down authors’ fees by, on average, over 40%.
Reinvigorated by the new initiatives that JEM has undertaken, we thought it was a perfect time to update the face of the journal as well (http://www.rupress.org/NewLook). We’re excited to introduce a new design for JEM in December 2017. The December issue will be the first to incorporate a new cover and journal logo. Redesign of the PDF version of articles will be rolled out over the coming months.
Because our readers primarily find our content online rather than through the print journal, our focus is always on the HTML. Therefore, we launched a new journal website last year with a cleaner design and improved readability. We’re now extending those same design principles across all versions of the journal.
JEM has long believed that the articles we publish should contain all the information needed for readers to assess and reproduce the work. As such, we will continue to have no limits on Materials and methods or References and have now introduced a cleaner design by using new fonts known for their clarity and legibility, improving our figure legend and table formatting, including clear links to referenced content, and providing citation information on every page.
In addition to this new look, and to enhance the reading experience, JEM will soon start publishing Graphical Abstracts—visual summaries of the main findings of an article that should capture the content at a glance. Graphical Abstracts will be available online only and will be used in social media promotions to highlight JEM articles.
We also wanted to use this redesign as an opportunity to strengthen the relationship with our sister journals—Journal of Cell Biology and Journal of General Physiology—at Rockefeller University Press (RUP). Our journals serve different but overlapping scientific communities, and we share the same core principles long championed by RUP: editorial integrity; science that stands the test of time; decisions by scientists for scientists. A new RUP logo—intended to evoke the fluidity and dynamism of biological systems—is now incorporated throughout the journals to cement our shared history and vision.
This redesign marks a time of exciting change and growth for JEM. We’ll be continuing to roll out initiatives in the coming year aimed at increased transparency, reproducibility, and inclusivity.
