Abstract
“In direct response to reader feedback, the items listed in World News are now arranged alphabetically by category.”
You will notice that a couple of things are different about this issue of JALA. The World News section has been reorganized, and the Meetings and Events calendar has been eliminated from our printed pages.
In direct response to reader feedback, the items listed in World News are now arranged alphabetically by category. There are nine categories—free technical information, application areas, automated systems, instrumentation and hardware, labware and lab supplies, microplates, informatics and computing, services, and more news. These categories are in sync with those found in The Market Place section of the ALA Web site and those used to organize exhibitor listings at LabAutomation conferences. We hope you will agree with the JALA readers who participated in our focus group discussion at LabAutomation2010 that this change will improve the readability and usefulness of this popular section.
The Meetings and Events calendar has been removed from our printed pages, but it has not disappeared. You can still find it in The Market Place—click on “Events” under “News & Notes” at www.labautomation.org/marketplace. Until now, the calendar has been published routinely in both JALA and The Market Place. Despite the fact that when surveyed, JALA readers have always expressed interest and appreciation for the calendar, the JALA Editorial Board made the decision to remove it from print to make more editorial pages available for scientific content.
On average, the calendar requires 30 editorial pages each year. Fortunately, as JALA's visibility has increased throughout related scientific communities, so have scientific manuscript submissions. JALA now has a healthy pipeline of peer-reviewed manuscripts awaiting publication. Publishing the calendar online only will enable us to get more of these manuscripts into print faster. In the meantime, I strongly encourage you to browse through the articles in press that are now posted at JALA Online. JALA articles in press are author corrected and approved page proofs that include digital object identifier numbers for citation purposes. These articles can be accessed for free by ALA members.
For instructions and access to JALA Online, simply go to www.labautomation.org, rollover the “JALA” tab, and click on “About JALA” in the drop-down menu. In addition to articles in press, you will find JALA Online offers full-text access to all content published since March 1999. Once you register as a user (registration is fast and free), you also can save your personal searches, and you can create search alerts, table of contents alerts, and citation alerts. This important ALA member benefit is powered by Elsevier, the world's leading publisher of science and health information and ALA's publishing partner for JALA. Please take advantage of everything it has to offer.
Sincerely,
