Publishing with the JEM—Faster, Brighter, and More Accurate

The changes reflect our ongoing determination to offer the speediest publication times and the most accurate figure reproduction. No more paper please Our new instructions to authors are geared entirely toward online submission. Beyond saving trees, this switch to accepting only electronic manuscripts means faster processing of papers from submission to review to publication. Currently, most reviewed manuscripts are returned within one month, and the time from acceptance to publication is only 4–6 weeks. Of course this not only reflects a dedicated office staff, who are being helped a great deal by online submissions, but also an exceptional group of referees. Cutting edge color With a fully electronic publication process in place, we can achieve new levels of accuracy in the reproduction of color micrographs. All color images will now be published online in their original red-green-blue (RGB) format. Digital images are captured in RGB color, which can be viewed by projection or on a computer monitor. But for the printed page, RGB images must be converted to CMYK (cyan-magenta-yellow-black), the color format used by industrial and desktop printers. Previously, we asked authors to convert their RGB images to CMYK color, which we would then convert back to RGB for online publication. There is a considerable loss in image quality at each step, and with most people now looking at the online version it seemed there must be a better way. Earlier this year our sister journal, the Journal of Cell Biology , took the plunge and became the first biomedical journal to publish original RGB images online (1). The response from the community has been universally positive. The JEM is now accepting only RGB color image files, and the August 2nd issue will be our first RGB issue. With this change the online journal, rather than the printed journal, becomes the definitive version. Authors will now receive electronic figure proofs, and it is the accuracy of the online figures rather than the printed figures that will be assured. Although there will be some color shift when converting to CMYK, we do not expect print quality to suffer. Our new conversion process is capable of producing a much more accurate color match than a simple mode change in Photoshop. Digital correctness For your manuscript to proceed smoothly in our streamlined production process, we need figures at the right resolution and in the right file format. With experience this is fairly …