Into the 21st Century
Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education
It is the end of a long day at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, in Washington, DC. The occasion has been a meeting of journal editors who work with Oxford University Press and discussion of new opportunities (and challenges) in journal publishing. As several new electronic features were discussed, I asked one of the OUP staff "How can we get these on the JDSDE homepage!" To my chagrin, she pointed out that they are already there. It seems that "behind the scenes," OUP has been upgrading Web pages and offering new services that benefit readers, authors, and reviewers—and I never took/had the time to notice. So, let me share some of the changes at Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education (JDSDE), changes that you really do want to know about.
For authors and reviewers, I am delighted to announce that beginning in September, JDSDE moved to an online submission and reviewing system known as Manuscript Central. Found at http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/jdsde, Manuscript Central will make manuscript processing more efficient for authors, reviewers, and editors. Most importantly, it should make the editorial process smoother and faster. JDSDE already has the best turnaround in our field, as the time from submission to editorial decision averages 7–8 weeks. If the system—and its users—work as planned, this should be reduced to 5–6 weeks, a real advantage for contributors and also for readers, who will be reading articles when they are still "hot" and timely. As someone who has been waiting 10 months for a review of an article from another journal, I believe that this change can only be good for the field.
For everyone who has ever accessed the JDSDE either in print or electronically, our new and evolving Web page (www.jdsde.oxfordjournals.org; Figure 1) offers some exciting new features. The expanded capabilities of the site include six that I will outline here—hopefully enough to encourage readers to visit the site and explore the others.
- Advance Access is a feature that makes accepted articles available as quickly as possible. On average, a paper is now available on the JDSDE Web site less than a month after it is accepted for publication—no longer requiring readers to wait until the print copy comes out to find articles of interest.
- Articles retrieved through the various search mechanisms on the Web site can be viewed either as HTML files or PDF files. Among other things, this provides readers with the ability to e-mail manuscripts to friends (and authors to e-mail them to their mothers) and download copies for later reading. And not only JDSDE articles are available. A new feature on the site allows readers to retrieve "similar articles" through search engines and scholarly databases worldwide through the HighWire system.
- Once articles are retrieved, figures can be downloaded and converted to PowerPoint slides for presentation and classroom use. For those of us who depend on the most recent literature in our teaching and scholarship, this provides a copyright-legal means of obtaining high-quality artwork quickly and easily.
- The JDSDE Web site now offers authors (and readers) the opportunity for Supplementary Data. This means that questionnaires, transcripts, and even video clips can be posted on the Web site to help readers better understand the methods and results of research published in the journal. No longer do interview techniques, sign language, and child behavior have to be 100% crafted into words—authors can post information on the Web site that would be cumbersome or impossible to include in the print version of the article.
- My Account is a feature whereby users can create a personalized Web folder that includes the results of previous searches, obtain pay-per-view downloads of articles and whole issues, and sign up for a variety of free services. You can even see how often your article (or someone else's) is cited by others.
- Speaking of free services, one of the most helpful is e-TOCs (electronic tables of contents). Through e-TOCs, readers can receive an e-mailed table of contents as each new issue of JDSDE is published. For that matter, because JDSDE and OUP are interconnected through the HighWire system, readers can receive e-TOCs from other journals in related (or unrelated) areas.
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Information exchange in the 21st century is changing faster than we ever could have imagined, even 10 years ago. The opportunities for anyone interested in deaf studies and deaf education are richer and more accessible than ever before. This is a wonderful time to be the Editor of JDSDE, and I join with our Editorial Board, Associate Editors, and OUP in looking forward to serving you even better in the future.
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