Exciting changes are in store for 2004 at PNAS. Beginning with this issue, the print edition of PNAS will be published weekly. Since the launch of the Track II system of direct manuscript submission in late 1995, PNAS has expanded in size and scope. While PNAS Online is extremely popular and easy to navigate, receiving ≈6 million hits per month, some print issues of PNAS have tipped the scales at four pounds. For the convenience of readers, PNAS is moving from 26 biweekly issues per year to 52 weekly issues.
Doubling the print frequency offers many advantages in addition to making issues more portable. The table of contents is easier to browse for relevant articles, and there are twice as many opportunities to feature papers with covers, cover taglines, or commentaries.
The change in print frequency will not affect the online journal. New content will still be published online in PNAS Early Edition each business day. As a reader service, PNAS continues to offer two types of free e-mail alerts:
CiteTrack (www.pnas.org/help/citetrack) will alert readers by e-mail when new PNAS content is published that matches criteria based on the topics, authors, and articles readers want to track.
Contents Awareness (www.pnas.org/cgi/alerts/etoc) allows readers to be notified via e-mail when new content goes online.
We have also improved the online journal. A Quick Search function allows searching from the PNAS interior pages. Readers can select how they want search results to be displayed by sorting them in ”newest first” or ”best match” order. A new feature adds context to search results by highlighting the search terms and showing the words that surround them in the articles. In addition, readers can simultaneously search PNAS, the 345 other HighWire Press-hosted journals, and all of Medline with the Quick Search function at the HighWire portal (www.highwire.org). Plus, PNAS Online will soon include Citation Map, a graphical tool that allows readers to view articles that are directly related by citation to a given article and that are frequently cited themselves.
PNAS is now indexed fully in Google (www.google.com), and the PNAS home page is ranked 9 of 10 by Google's Page-Rank feature, a measure of the importance of a page. In 2004, the PNAS home page will be further updated with a new look and improved functionality. The home page will feature easy links to new PNAS features such as Classic papers, Inaugural Articles and their companion Biographies, and the top 50 papers read each month. The home page will also contain a link to ”This Week in PNAS Early Edition,” a new feature that highlights papers published each week online.
New elements have also been added to PNAS Online articles. In 2003, PNAS began branding article PDFs with a bar and logo to easily identify the origin of the PDF after downloading and printing. An upcoming feature will allow readers to download an image from an article as a .ppt file and incorporate it into powerpoint presentations.
We hope that authors find that our new online submission and peer review system (www.PNAScentral.org), launched in November 2003, makes submitting papers easier and continues to decrease the time from submission to publication. Finally, PNAS will continue to expand free online access to articles from volume 1 in 1915 through papers published 6 months ago, both at our own site and through PubMed Central.
We welcome your feedback on these features and any others that you might find useful. Now is an exciting time to innovate in scientific publishing.