Online Firsts

Will help to reduce delays in publication of research findings

The BMJ is about to start posting its original research articles on bmj.com before they appear in the print BMJ. They will appear in a new section on bmj.com called “Online First.” By early next year we expect all the research articles we publish to appear online first.

Like many journals, we are doing this because the research community wants results of studies to be publicly available as soon as practicable and because electronic publication makes it possible to remove some of the delays associated with print publication. At present papers are edited and often there are inevitable delays before they are published. At the very least they wait, unread, during the nine days between the time that we start to put a week's issue together and the time the print version …