“FAST HEART”
There is one problem all editors of scientific journals encounter—how to get important material published quickly. We have overcome this to some extent by introducing “Online First” (http://heart.bmjjournals.com/onlinefirst.dtl) which has now been running successfully on the journal's website since March 2005. Although this allows a paper to be citable within two weeks of being accepted by the journal, it does not speed up the review process. The review process is hampered by the general inertia of the system, in particular the time it takes to get reviews back from reviewers. This is because everybody is busy and there are not enough good reviewers to go around.
To counter this Heart has introduced a new feature: “Rapid Communications”. The full details of these Rapid Communications can be found in the instructions to authors (http://heart.bmjjournals.com/ifora/). They will be a little shorter than the average full paper, and are intended for scientific results that are of particular importance and merit rapid publication. By accelerating and personalising the review process we hope to be able to accept a Rapid Communication for publication within four weeks, and guarantee that it will be published on the web within the following week; it will appear in the next print version of the journal to be produced after the acceptance date. This very rapid process will depend on immediate responses from reviewers, and also a rapid turnaround from the authors once they have received their paper for revision.
We anticipate that we may be overwhelmed with requests for this type of publication unless we only process those papers that are recognisable as having great merit at first sight. Clearly if everybody asks for this service nobody will get it! The main safeguard is that if the paper is clearly unsuitable as a Rapid Communication because it does not satisfy the one criterion of being outstandingly important, then the paper will be returned to the authors unprocessed and will need to be resubmitted; we cannot simply divert it into the normal review process.
Rapid Communications is now open for business and we hope that we will see a healthy number of important papers coming through this route.