Abstract
Journal of Cerebral Blood Flow and Metabolism (JCBFM), which this year celebrates its 36th birthday, has a new publisher! After 15 successful years with Nature Publishing Group (NPG), the International Society for Cerebral Blood Flow and Metabolism has decided to work with SAGE Publications to bring the journal closer to the forefront of scientific publishing. Scientific publishing is currently undergoing a revolution. Publishers are merging to create megacorporations: This year Holtzbrinck Publishing Group and BC Partners, a venture capital firm, merged Macmillan Science and Education (which owns NPG) with Springer Science + Business Media. On the other end of the spectrum, every week dozens of new scientific journals are popping out of nowhere, many of them for the sole purpose of hustling authors (‘predatory publishing’). At the same time, social media and blogging play an ever-increasing role in the exchange of scientific information, sometimes even shortcutting and superseding the classic process of publication of an article in a journal. Online only, open access, open and post-publication review, and study preregistration are just a few buzzwords of the changing landscape of scientific publication. Finally, the internet is impacting full force on how scientists make their results known.
Our new publisher, SAGE, is embracing these changes and operates at the forefront of these exciting developments. SAGE was founded 50 years ago by Sara Miller McCune to support the dissemination of usable knowledge and educate a global community. It is independent, privately owned, and has a strong philanthropic mission, providing for example free access to its journals in many less developed countries. It now publishes over 850 journals including those of more than 400 learned societies and institutions. Alongside this, SAGE has a growing suite of innovative library products such as archives, data, case studies, video, and its highly successful online tool SAGE Research Methods.
JCBFM will benefit from SAGE’s experience and drive and will try to reinvent itself, capitalizing on the tremendous opportunities provided by this partnership. New brooms sweep clean: In an evolutionary process, we will implement a number of new features. This will be done with the help of the publications committee, which oversaw the process of selecting a new publisher, our editorial board, and our editorial office staff. Suggestions and input of our readers are also very welcome. We will strengthen our presence on social media and try to improve the quality and rigor of papers published in JCBFM by formally checking for compliance with guidelines (such as ARRIVE) or soundness of statistical analysis, directly linking citations in articles via Highwire, and increasing our push towards open access and open data, among other initiatives. Stay tuned!