Abstract
In 1987, I was honored to be appointed by the SDMS Board to succeed the founding editor of the JDMS, Dr. Mimi Berman, as Editor of the JDMS. Following Mimi Berman, who is a true legend in the history of sonography, was a very humbling and intimidating experience. Mimi did an amazing job setting up the journal with its publisher, J.P. Lippincott, and putting in place an editorial board of leading sonographers and physicians with very comprehensive procedures for transcript submissions and reviewing. I was so lucky to essentially inherit a turnkey operation so I and the editorial board could, hopefully, continue to build the quality and reputation of the journal. Mimi was a great mentor and was always available to consult with a young and nervous editor.
For those who may not have been alive, a working professional or practicing in sonography at that time it indeed was a different world to function in with communications and moving documents around. After I received a few boxes of papers and transcripts, I was ready to continue providing opportunities, through medical journal publishing, to influence the sonography community! Email was just beginning, so most people did not have an address or had no access to an email account, while at work. So essentially, all personal communications were by traditional mail, telephone, and fax machine. By the way, fax machines were relatively new with dial up modems and expensive to use as telephone companies charged very high rates for long distance fax machine calls.
All authored transcripts were written on paper and send to expert reviewers by postage mail. Yes, the mail was just as slow as it is today so everything took many weeks and months to get a manuscript reviewed and accepted for publication. Federal Express (now FedEx) was around, but was simply too expensive and did not have the geographic reach, as it does today, for authors and the journal to use on a consistent basis. Imagine the back and forth through snail mail with hand written reviewers comments and authors responses. Oh yes, there was no widespread software to edit documents, like Word, so all was done by hand and red ink. Manuscripts were most often typed on a typewriter, using a lot of white out (sorry to those who have no idea what that is), with very few documents printed on a dot-matrix printer (again, sorry). In fact, the most popular used document software was a program called Word Perfect (those of you who were at the technological cutting edge at that time will remember).
Sonograms and graphics that were part of a transcript, were printed separately as 5x7 glossy pictures and labeled on the back side of the picture.
A farcical experience that I remember well was with an obstetrical transcript that came from South Korea. The mailing stamp showed it was mailed two months earlier, which between the mail service and hospital mail room was not surprising. However, the transcript was written in Korean. I e-mailed, using my MCI account (again, sorry to those who have no idea what I’m talking about) to Wayne Persutte, who was the journal’s Associate Editor for OB/GYN, wondering what we should do. We both felt it would be great to have an international paper in the journal. So, the first step was to get the paper translated to English. I was at the University of Washington and there was a Korean neurology resident who I knew and he agreed to translate the paper—great! Well, he rewrote the paper by hand and having a physician hand write something, with English being a second language, well let’s say it was a learning opportunity for me. After a few more rounds of scripting with Wayne being mailed different stages of the manuscript to see if the translations made sense we then needed to contact the authors to be sure nothing was lost in translation. A phone number was on the transcript so I ventured to call, given the time differences, but the hospital phone system didn’t have the capability to make international calls. So I had to make the phone call from my home, which was a challenge-but it worked. I had the resident come to my house so he could talk directly to the authors, who happen to have an English speaker close by and they verbally approved the translated manuscript for review. Wayne then went through the normal process of getting the article peer reviewed.
All of this is summarized in a paragraph, but six months had already gone by. Now the English revisions were complete and I sent the paper back to Korea (at least a month of mailing time) asking if they could address the reviewers comments and send back a modified transcript in English for final approval for publication. Several months later, and over a year in total, I get the paper back and it looked ready for publication. But, during that same week of excitement that JDMS was going to publish an international research paper, I was looking at published abstracts from other journals. I noticed an abstract that looked very familiar. Yes, it was the same paper from Korea that was just published in another journal. Although our first foray in publishing an international paper for JDMS wasn’t successful, it did set up a better system for future transcripts from outside of North America, especially for those that English was not their primary language. Don’t you think there would have been a different outcome in today’s world with instantaneous global communications and the ability of using auto-translation software or the plethora of translation services?
One of the biggest challenges during my tenure as JDMS editor was a new section on publishing sonography related abstracts from all major medical journals. Come to find out, this was never done before so it required many phone calls to editors, publishers, and lawyers to get permission to print ultrasound related abstracts from other journals, in the JDMS. The abstract section lasted several years, but the need waned as electronic access to journals grew in popularity.
Aside from examples of how JDMS functioned 30 years ago, the reality is during those times more transcripts were being peered reviewed and published on schedule. The journal was also receiving a good amount of advertising from equipment manufacturers and other types of ultrasound related companies allowing the costs of the journal to be offset.
Although I’m describing a different era of JDMS journal publishing, many facets required for success then remains even more true today. The main seed for success in any era is of course people. The need to have an active community with passion, skills, and expertise was and continues to be a standout quality for sonography. Sonographer and physician volunteers provided their services to expand the scope and importance of a young profession through the JDMS to form an outstanding editorial board, and transcript reviewers. Of course a journal always needs professionals to write and report clinical studies and findings to share their knowledge to all of the community. During my era of being an editor of JDMS, sonography-based research was becoming more sophisticated and the volume of research papers and clinical case studies being submitted to the JDMS was increasing. The breadth and quality of research and case studies allowed the journal to gain more brand recognition with the field of sonography.
For whatever success my tenure as an editor was it would have not been impossible without the support of my fellow sonographers and physicians at the University of Washington Ultrasound Department in Seattle, Washington. They covered for me with my patient schedules and allowed me to deal with journal issues that at times popped up at the most inconvenient times. I will always thank them with my deepest appreciation.
When my term as editor was over, I packed up several boxes of transcripts, letters, and other papers and sent them through the postal service to the SDMS office. I knew the new editor, Jean Lea Spitz, would be receiving these boxes and probably have a feeling of being overwhelmed and excitement, as I did. Jean did a phenomenal job with the journal through her tenure and I hope I was as helpful and supportive, as Mimi Berman had been to me.