Critical Care: a good scientific citizen just got better

In April 2003, Critical Care made two important changes: firstly, only the abstracts of research articles now appear in print while the full text is open access (freely and universally accessible online); and secondly, all articles over two years old are free to access online – including commentaries, reviews and reports. All this is part of the journal's ongoing quest to be a good scientific citizen, and the publisher's ongoing drive to use the Internet to provide novel solutions to meet the information needs of the biomedical community. The move to have only the abstracts of research articles in the print journal with open access to full text online was logical. Publishing research articles online as soon as they are ready means they are likely to be picked up by the most interested parties via searching well before they would have been available in print. Those that browse the print journal are unlikely to read every research article word-for-word on publication [1]. Instead, most readers tend to browse titles, abstracts or conclusions, preferring to read in detail only after searching databases like PubMed. When such a search leads to an article in Critical Care [2], the journal's online functionality will assist further – you can search PubMed for other articles by authors, email articles to colleagues, post and read comments, download references or read the abstracts in PubMed, and even link to the full text of a reference (if it's made available by its publisher). Presenting research articles as abstracts in the print journal and providing open access, full text versions online, then, satisfies both types of users – the print browsers and the online searchers. Our new way of publishing research articles will have a new citation system. Previously, research articles published online were cited as " in press " until they were included in the print journal, at which point the allotted page numbers were incorporated to make the final citation. In the new system the research articles will be paginated as soon as they are published online and separately from other types of articles. Their page numbers will have the prefix " R ". The abstracts of these research articles will appear subsequently and sequentially in the print journal according to the page numbers. This system has been accepted by databases such as PubMed, and the ISI Web of Knowledge, the company that calculates impact factors. Making …