Images in Paediatric Cardiology – just preteen

Images in Paediatric Cardiology was launched in 1999, when it was becoming increasingly obvious that the Internet had the potential to document colour images in journal manuscripts with greater ease (and no additional cost) online when compared to print journals, and that multimedia (such as sound and animation) could also be supported.

The overall costs of journals hosted online are also substantially less than print journals as printing costs are eliminated. It was worth looking back at some predictions were made several issues (and years) ago, as understanding the past may help us reduce our collective rate of error when attempting to predict the future.

On the journal's first anniversary, this editor remarked that Images Paediatr Cardiol (even back then) anticipated the United States’ National Institutes of Health (NIH) proposal to set up a single electronic database and full text repository for peer reviewed biomedical research papers.¹ Dr. Varmus proposed “a system for electronic publication of new results and ideas in the biomedical sciences. We do this with the conviction that such means of publication can accelerate the dissemination of information, enrich the reading experience, deepen discussions among scientists, reduce frustrations with traditional mechanisms for publication, and save substantial sums of public and private money.”² This concept was initially known as E-Biomed and it became a natural extension of the National Library of Medicine's PubMed service, eventually evolving into PubMed Central (PMC).³

It was also noted that such a step would be the most revolutionary change in scientific publishing since the appearance of the first peer-reviewed publications, and would potentially free up the budgets of libraries worldwide at publishing houses’ expense.³ The article also naively wondered whether such a repository would force most journals to move exclusively on-line in order to exist on diminished budgets due to subscription losses, an event that has not yet materialised.³ A single year after the abovementioned article was published, PMC was launched. The legitimacy and advantages of electronic publication were also highlighted in an earlier paper in this journal ten years ago, in 2002.⁴

It therefore gives this editor great pleasure to announce, on behalf of the editorial board and our board of reviewers, that Images in Paediatric Cardiology is now also available in PubMed Central and indexed in PubMed. This has been done through collaboration with a publisher (Medknow Publications - http://www.medknow.com) who has helped the journal conversion from HTML to PubMed Central compliant XML, that is, a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form, such that papers submitted to PMC are incorporated into the database almost automatically, with a minimum of costly and potentially error-prone human intervention.

Authors who have contributed their work to the journal will be pleased to know that the journal has obtained funds to convert all extant articles, that is, all the way back to 1999, to PubMed Central.

The scope of the journal will, however, remain unchanged, that is, to illustrate graphically the subspeciality of paediatric cardiology.

The editor wishes to take this opportunity thank all of the colleagues who have helped and encouraged the creation and maintenance of this journal for the past twelve years, which is best described as a labour of love.

Thanks also go to patient (and unpaid) editorial colleagues and reviewers, unsung heroes in all such ventures, as well as our authors who placed sufficient faith in the journal to submit their publications to Images in Paediatric Cardiology.

The editors hope that the journal will continue to provide interesting and high quality papers for the perusal of all interested readers, as well as functioning as a free repository for teaching materials and other educational needs.