Publishing in JDI
 
Authors:
Janice C. Honeyman-Buck, PhD, FSIIM, The Society for Imaging Informatics in Medicine
 
Background:
The Journal of Digital Imaging is always evolving and growing and has now established enhanced policies and guidelines for our authors. This is an ongoing task for our journal, as well as for the other radiology and imaging journals. In order to make our journal one that both represents the interests of our readers and encourages the highest level of ethical publishing practices, we have introduced several policies for conflict of interest, ethical treatment of animal and human subjects, and reduction of duplicate publication. In addition, we have developed guidelines for authors so we can maintain high quality standards in the publication of figures.
 
Evaluation:
We have evaluated the submissions to JDI for the past 12 months to identify areas in which authors have required assistance when preparing their manuscripts. Other than the usual changes that are requested during the peer review process, we have found that many authors require help with preparing figures for publication and with English grammar. To that end, SIIM assisted by hosting e-tutorials produced by Tony Siebert to help authors prepare figures. We have evaluated several sites that show promise for helping authors express their ideas more grammatically.

In addition to helping authors with manuscript preparation, SIIM and JDI are now encouraging authors to submit full data sets when their work involves the manipulation of DICOM images. We have established an FTP site where other researchers can download the data sets to reproduce the results from the original authors. We have established methods to help us assure that figures submitted with manuscripts have not be altered inappropriately, and we are investigating watermarking all figures published in JDI so they cannot be used in other publications without obtaining copyright permission.
 
Discussion:
The editors and staff at JDI have been working proactively to improve the research and information content, the authenticity of materials, and the reader interest in our journal. We are actively recruiting articles that will add to our knowledge base and adding features we think our readers will enjoy, such as the point / counter point series, our guest commentator on radiology reports and our “TechBits” page. At the same time, we are trying some innovation in publishing by providing full DICOM datasets used in research, as well as protecting our electronic versions with watermarking.
 
Conclusion:
We want to communicate the changes we are making in JDI to both help authors produce the best possible manuscript and to provide ever improving content. These new innovations will help make JDI the “go to” journal for medical informatics articles and will establish SIIM as the organization that makes it all happen.
 
References:
1. Journal of Digital Imaging Instructions for Authors. Available at http://www.siimweb.org/WorkArea/showcontent.aspx?id=2432. Accessed 9/7/2009.

2. Tony Seibert. Image Manipulation Guidance: Producing Journal-Quality Images. Available at www.siimweb.org/e-tutorials. Accessed 9/7/2009.