Jason D. Wright, MD:

Jason D. Wright, MD

Ringing in the New Year has become synonymous with new beginnings. It's a time to reflect on things you'd like to improve upon, a time to imagine things you'd like to achieve, and a time to set new goals. Our New Year's resolution at Obstetrics & Gynecology is to improve the experience of our authors. Over the last several months, we've taken your suggestions and re-assessed how we collect, evaluate, and disseminate the science our authors submit and the content we deliver to our readers. In the coming months, you'll see a number of new initiatives directed at simplifying submission, expediting review, and improving the delivery and use of our authors' work. Quite simply, we want to put authors first.

In the immortal words of Ben Franklin, time is money. We understand the imperative for the rapid dissemination of scientific work and commentary on contemporaneous issues, and we take great pride in our ability to rapidly process and publish submissions. At Obstetrics & Gynecology, we strive to rapidly return an initial decision on submissions and to publish all accepted manuscripts within 6 months. In 2022, 91% of accepted manuscripts were published in less than 6 months' time. This is a high bar and far exceeds industry standards in academic publishing.

Despite this performance, we can do even better, and we're introducing a number of programs to facilitate the ease and timeliness of submission for our authors. For manuscripts that contain work that is of high priority, we've introduced a Portable Peer Review program. Through this program, peer-review comments received from prior submission to a general medical journal can be submitted for the editor's consideration along with an author's manuscript. We'll assess these peer-review comments, obtain an expedited review from one of our Editorial Board members, and render an initial decision within 10 days of submission. Authors planning to use the Portable Peer Review Program should obtain preapproval from an editor. If you have work that qualifies for Portable Peer Review, we want to see it! Please contact us at [email protected].

You'll also see changes in how manuscripts are processed once they've been submitted. Double-blind peer review, the program in which not only authors are blinded to the identity of peer reviewers, but peer reviewers are also blinded to the identify of authors, was introduced to encourage unbiased review and help level the playing field for authors. The double-blind process was introduced a year and a half ago to help bring equity to our scientific reviews. Based on your feedback, the double-blind peer-review process has evolved, and we now allow more discretion in citing an author's prior work or a parent clinical trial. We believe these changes allow us to maintain the spirit of anonymity in the peer-review process but also allow us to preserve the full scientific integrity of submissions.

We're streamlining and simplifying the process for manuscripts invited for revision. This redesign of the revision process will reduce the administrative burden placed on authors. We've created a checklist for authors to help them make the nonscientific changes needed before acceptance and reduced nonscientific queries to which authors must respond. Once a revision is submitted, our team provides scientific editing of the text and graphic design for figures to enhance the presentation of an author's findings. In addition to our already fast publication process, we are working toward finding ways to make your accepted work available online more rapidly, again highlighting our commitment to rapidly get your science into the hands of our readers.

Getting our authors' work published is just the first step. We want to amplify their message and disseminate their work as widely as we can so that our authors receive the credit they deserve. We're introducing new audio and video content to highlight each issue of the journal and to shed light on important issues in obstetrics and gynecology. In October 2022, we introduced the “Green Screen,” a monthly video that features a short summary of each issue of the Journal. We'll also be rolling out a series of podcasts that address important topics in women's health. Finally, we want to better disseminate our authors' work to the community at large. We're collaborating with ACOG's Communications Department so that each month we can select an article of broad interest and develop and distribute a press release to media outlets across the country. We want the science we publish to reach not only physicians and scientists, but also patients and other stakeholders.

In the same vein of promoting our authors' work, we're enhancing our social media efforts. This started with the selection of Dr. Stephanie Ros as our inaugural Consultant Editor for Social Media. Thanks to Dr. Ros and our new Social Media Committee, you'll see much greater online activity to promote the Journal's content and authors. We've redesigned our visual content that you'll now see across a variety of social media platforms. We're also bringing more interactive content to social media. This will allow our readers to directly interact with authors and open discussion on how what is published in Obstetrics & Gynecology can be implemented into practice.

Over the past year, Dr. Ebony Carter, our Associate Editor for Equity, has laid out our plans to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion in everything we do at the Journal.1 As a part of these efforts, the October 2023 issue will be a special issue on Racism and Reproductive Health. This special issue will contain novel content and focus attention on solution-based approaches to racism in reproductive health. As a part of this initiative, we will engage new authors and scholars and bring a diversity of voices to the discussions. Our hope is that this issue will serve as a source document for reproductive equity scholars. Our commitment to putting authors first extends to all authors, scientists, and scholars across our discipline. Importantly, this special issue is not an end, but rather a beginning to our commitment to equity in reproductive health.

Finally, while we're putting authors first, we're also advancing our efforts to help develop the next generation of authors, scholars, and academicians. We're working toward a formal peer reviewer–training program to introduce early-stage physicians to academic publishing. The program will provide hands-on peer review and training in scientific writing for early-career physicians. We hope to pair early-career physicians with senior peer reviewers. The program will be open to anyone, but geared particularly to physicians with limited opportunities for academic mentorship. Last year we also welcomed our inaugural Editorial Fellow. Our editorial fellowship is designed to provide a year-long immersive training program in all aspects of academic publishing. In essence, we're training the next generation of journal editors.

As we welcome the New Year, we're excited about our efforts to promote our authors at Obstetrics & Gynecology. We hope we can make submission as easy as possible, turnaround reviews as quickly as feasible, and disseminate work as widely as we can. As always, we welcome suggestions on how to further improve the author experience. We hope to make 2023 the year of the author.

1. Carter EB. Racism in reproductive health: we must DO (dismantle oppression) better. Obstet Gynecol 2022;140:1–3. doi: 10.1097/AOG.0000000000004845