Electronic Media and the Journal

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Ahh, the text message – the secret language of today's youth. We recently had a conversation in an Editorial Staff meeting with one of the dental students here at Indiana University. He explained to us the news gathering processes of the current crop of students; needless to say, it had nothing to do with the newspaper or the 5 o'clock evening news broadcast. Today's news consumer gets their info from twitter, facebook, rss feeds and podcasts; for this group, the electron is mightier than the sword.

It hasn't been easy, but we figured that it is time to drag the journal, kicking and screaming, solidly into the electronic age. Sure we've dabbled, we have had manuscript submissions mainly electronic for 8 or so years now, we have published online for almost 6 years, and for the last 4 years we have done all our reviewing and manuscript processing exclusively online. Well, that isn't good enough now, it's time to really make this journal available to as many as desire to read it. With that in mind we would like to introduce you to some of our new and upcoming projects.

Our Academy members have asked and asked, and it is here – a pdf of the entire journal. This pdf can be downloaded into your tablets, smartphones and other e-reader devices so you can take the journal with you wherever you go.

We have started a Newsletter. It isn't anything fancy, and it isn't anything that our online subscribers couldn't do for themselves; but it is one of the best read and most responded to newsletters in our industry! Many of you have seen the email – we have taken the table of contents of issue 3 a couple of days before it came out, and sent to all of our subscribers for whom we had an email address. The response was overwhelmingly positive: of the 2000 emails we sent out, 38.7% of you opened the email – compared with 22.7% industry wide, 12.6% of you clicked on the links to get to specific articles – compared with 1.5% industry wide! We are so proud of each of you for the interest that you take in staying current with new research and techniques that make you the excellent dentists that you are! If you did not get this Newsletter, and would like to, please visit our homepage at www.jopdent.org and fill in your email information at the bottom of the screen, choose the format you prefer to receive, then click subscribe, the next table of contents will be sent your way, with all the necessary links to access the articles.

While you are at the bottom of our Homepage, you will also see that we have made our presence known in Social Media. Facebook and Twitter are here to stay, and we are ready and (mostly) willing to “tweet”, “retweet”, “post to our wall” and be “liked” and “followed”. We are still working on our twitter feed, but if you visit us on Facebook we are posting links to all of our online early content, so you can be the first to see new papers as they come out in the (almost) finished form. We intend to get twitter to do the same, but haven't worked all the bugs out quite yet. We encourage you to follow us on Twitter and Like us on Facebook, so you can get the most out of your subscription. We also recommend that you introduce these links to your friends and collegues. There are many out there that may only be interested in 2 −3 of our manuscripts a year and therefore a subscription would not be worthwhile, but having access to a feed of all the upcoming titles may pique their interest in some specific articles – a win-win for authors, the journal, and most of all for the profession.

Upcoming projects include a new mobile interface for the journal, so you can more quickly get to online content from your smartphones and tablets. It is an exciting thing for us seeing how this new programming will work. You can sit in your office, scan through the titles, mark articles you would like to read, then access them on-the-go in a link on your mobile device. You can be sitting in a plane, waiting for the door to close, pull up the list of articles, choose what you would like to read during the flight, and the device will quickly download the selected articles to your hard-drive so you can read them after you lose Wi-Fi.

We also expect that in the not too distant future, all our scientific content will be made available online. This will allow anyone to have the access they need to our past publications that include so much important foundational research for what we all do today.

I expect that sometime in the more distant future we will all be able to subscribe to inner-cranial subscriptions where we can have our journal downloaded directly to our cerebrum for instant access when we need it, but till that time – happy reading!