The issue of access to the manuscripts published in HPB is important to both members and to the HPB community. Currently HPB is not indexed by the best known indexing service, Index Medicus/MEDLINE. HPB shall undergo review next year by the Index Medicus committee. I hope and trust that the quality of the journal and its contents shall make it obvious to the assessing committee that HPB be indexed by them thereafter. It is important to remember that indexing is retrospective, hence all of the recently published manuscripts shall be indexed.
It is important, however, to note that HPB currently is indexed in Excerpta Medica/EMBASE and SIIC database. This is the broadest indexing service in the world and is available through libraries and electronically on subscription. The need for subscription is what makes it less attractive to doctors than Index Medicus/MEDLINE, which can be accessed without subscription. This fact probably accounts for the broad popularity of Index Medicus/MEDLINE over Excerpta Medica/EMBASE and hence our strong desire ultimately to be included in Index Medicus/MEDLINE and, consequently, PubMed.
HPB can be accessed by subscribers online either via the IHPBA website at www.ihpba.org or through the journal website at www.tandf.no/hpb
From there you can click through to all issues and supplements from volume 3, 2000.
In addition, under prEview, you will find articles not yet placed in an issue but ready for publication. As the word indicates, prEview opens the possibility to view articles online before they are placed in an issue. Once an article appears on prEview it is considered officially published and can be cited by means of its Digital Object Identifier number (DOI). As long as the article appears on prEview the DOI number should be used for citation. When the article appears in an issue (archived) it will disappear from prEview. However, the DOI number follows the article into print so that the article will eventually have two references by which it can be identified, i.e. its DOI and its volume/issue/page range.
When you access HPB online you will find the articles in full text pdf format. As from 2006 the journal will also be produced with an optional html version which brings with it a number of benefits for the end user such as intuitive and easy navigation, figures available in three viewing sizes, internal linking to tables, figures and references, comprehensive external reference linking, and browsing by figures and tables.
Our publisher, Taylor & Francis, is one of 29 leading journal publishers participating in CrossRef, the official DOI registration agency for scholarly and professional publications. It operates a cross-publisher citation linking system that allows a researcher to click on a reference citation on one publisher's platform and link directly to the cited content on another publisher's platform, subject to the target publisher's access control practices. The citation-linking network today covers millions of articles and other content items from several hundred scholarly and professional publishers.
If you want to see what has been published on a specific subject in HPB, e.g. liver, you may go to the journal website www.tandf.no/hpb and enter liver in the search field of the upper right hand corner.
Each time an issue is ready for publication online – a few weeks before you will receive the printed version – you will be sent an email with the content list. Should you find a title to be of interest, you may click on it and get directly to the full text, which you can either read on screen or print out, as described above. This is the so-called SARA service (Scholarly Alert Research Articles). You may recommend it to anybody interested in being continuously updated on HPB (http://www.tandf.co.uk/sara/).
Finally I wish to inform readers that we are working with our publisher to provide online submission facility. This will be an important development, which will facilitate submission manuscripts and speed up the reviewing process. It is anticipated that this facility will become available in early 2006, as the journal issues increase from 4 to 6 per year.
HPB is the premier journal which internationally represents the specialty of liver, biliary and pancreatic surgery. In the last issue were published pancreas and biliary manuscripts of work presented at the IHPBA World Congress of May 2004. In this issue the best of the liver manuscripts are published along with a review of the liver presentations that were made at the World Congress.