EDITOR'S NOTE
Dear reader,
As of this coming July, História, Ciências, Saúde Manguinhos will have been circulating without interruption for fifteen years. You will notice that the graphic design of the journal you have just opened features a gamut of changes, particularly regarding layout and fonts. The print area covers more space, affording a 20% savings in the number of pages. We have also sacrificed part of the former generous margin, where readers could jot down their own thoughts and where reference notes appeared, now relocated at the end of each article. The narrower margin is intended in part to offset the consequences of the growing number of approved submissions, which has increase the journal's thickness, pushed up printing and mailing costs, and so on.
We have opted to use new font families, like Stone Serif for body text and Myriad Pro for headings, subtitles, and department titles. To cut printing costs, we have gone back to 90-gram offset paper.
The new design of the opening pages of our Analysis department leaves more room for abstracts, lends greater visibility to author information, and brings submission and approval dates to the top of each article. The opening pages of other sections have also been modified, primarily with aesthetics in mind.
Our new design still incorporates background images and vignettes sourced from the ornamentation and architectural elements of the Moorish Castle, emblem of the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation.
Please note that História, Ciências, Saúde Manguinhos continues to invest in its bilingual identity. An average of four or five articles in every issue are now being translated into English and released online at www.scielo.br/hcsm, both in English and in the language in which the article appears in the journal itself.
Other changes are under consideration. The Theses department will either be eliminated or revamped. So many dissertations and theses are now available in their entirety on the internet that very few abstracts actually reach our desk.
Following the example of some of the foremost periodicals in the biomedical field, História, Ciências, Saúde Manguinhos might begin publishing online ahead of print. The initial idea is to display only the title, abstract, and keywords for articles awaiting publication in both the journal and the online version, linked to the Casa de Oswaldo Cruz's site. A few full versions of articles would appear on the SciELO portal ahead of print. Most biomedical periodicals adopting this innovation do so basically to better compete for citations and for priority in releasing the results of scientific research. But this is not what impels our decision: above all, we would like to reduce the suffering of our contributors, who still have to wait several months before seeing their papers in print.
A final noteworthy difference will be our new editor of the Books & Networks department. André Vieira Campos has done an excellent job in this post but, unfortunately, other professional commitments prevent him from continuing. His name will still be listed on our masthead, while we finish publishing reviews over which he had responsibility. I would like to take this opportunity to welcome our new editor, a historian like André: Carlos Henrique Assunção Paiva.
Jaime Benchimol
Editor
Publication Dates
-
Publication in this collection
09 Apr 2008 -
Date of issue
Mar 2008
