Abstract
If you are reading the print edition of JRSM or have opened a pdf of a journal article on our website, you may notice that the design has changed. Medical journals tend to favour a dull and serious look, and you may still consider that JRSM does, but our intention was to modernize our pages, offer authors a better showcase for their work, and make reading more pleasurable. Journal articles should not be inscrutable.
The most obvious change is that JRSM is now in colour throughout, which means that tables, figures, and images will come to life. You might ask why these particular colours have been chosen. The Royal Society of Medicine, like any sensible organization with a public profile, has a designated palette of colours to use for all its publications. JRSM was free to select whichever colours it wished but it made most sense for JRSM to be recognizable as an RSM publication. JRSM remains editorially independent of the Society but it is still the Society's journal.
Apart from colour, the pages have been redesigned. The cover has been tweaked. Inside, titles and authors are now more prominent. Abstracts and summaries are moved to a single column with a colour background to make them stand out and easier to read. Declarations are moved to the end of each article. None of this is revolutionary, or especially original, but JRSM is now comparable with leading medical journals in terms of presentation.
Naturally, the primary challenge for any medical journal is to publish high-quality articles while maintaining exemplary publication ethics. Publication ethics are in the hands of the editorial team, and JRSM editorial policies on competing interests, contributorship statements, provenance statements, patient consent and open peer review place it among the more progressive medical journals. High-quality articles cannot always be guaranteed, however, despite the best intentions of authors and editors, but when we do publish these better papers we can now publish them in a fitting manner.
A scientific journal should never be a triumph of style over substance but anything of substance deserves to be presented in style.