Letters

Pleasing both authors and readers

From ELPS to hypER papers

Editors' reply

From ELPS to hypER papers

EDITORThe idea of introducing a dual publishing strategya short version in the paper journal and a longer version in the electronic journal¹is a move in the right direction, but in its present form at the BMJ new problems arise. How should these different versions be cited or indexed? Which sections of the long paper should be deleted for the abridged version? Will there be multiple electronic versions of a single paper aimed at different readerships? Does this all really save time, or will readers eventually have to browse through two or more versions of the same paper to find the information they are looking for?

Rather than publishing simultaneously two or more "linear" versions of the same paper I suggest going one step further and using the full power of the medium of the world wide web with hypertext to enrich a short paper (hypertext enriched research papers, or hypER papers). The short hypER paper could be printed in the paper journal and in the same form be published electronically as hypertextthat is, containing "clickable" phrases enabling readers to "zoom" to the aspects of the paper that they are specifically interested in. The discussion could, for example, contain hyperlinked phrases such as "owing to methodological problems, data on quality of life may be biased towards underestimation of the drug effect," which may be skipped by general practitioners and clicked by researchers interested in this methodological issue. This would prevent readers interested in specific details from having to read through a second longer version, and for indexing or citation purposes it avoids having to deal with multiple parallel versions of an article.

The next step would be to automatically display articles customised to the needs of individual readers. The system would know the preferences and background of registered readers (perhaps even by learning from previous actions) and expand automatically the hyperlinks that show potentially interesting information for a particular readerfor example, molecular details for a molecular biologist and additional explanations for a general practitioner.

However, this all clearly means more work for editorial staff, so you may end up pleasing authors and readers but not editors.

Gunther Eysenbach, editor, Journal of Medical Internet Research. 
Unit for Cybermedicine, Department of Clinical Social Medicine, University of Heidelberg, Bergheimer Strasse 58, 69115 Heidelberg, Germany ey{at}yi.com

We received 11 electronic responses¹ to our proposal to publish shortened versions of articles in the paper version of the BMJ and longer versions in the eBMJ (ELPS, as we call it, for "electronic long, paper short.").² In general the response was positive.

View larger version (30K): [in this window] [in a new window]   Summary of electronic responses

"ELPS is a relevant innovation and its `evolution' should be encouraged ... new proposals such as ELPS could really contribute to merge useful scientific experiences from a wide range of professions; it could foster interactions `between' the worlds of research and practice" (F Carinci).

"Instead of making the paper journal a repetition of the eBMJ, it is indeed a novel experiment to produce shortened versions for reading between patients in the surgery and have the full text, even full data, available online for the more seriously interested academics or researchers. Web publishing is the present not the future" (I Chakravorty).

Some readers, however, prefer to have everything in the paper version because they are "highly interested in knowing all the available information when an article is published. Jumping to conclusions from some few lines is a common mistake among many professionals" (R Pflaumer). "The difficulty will be how to shorten the articles and where to place the weight and emphasis of the study." (A Risk).

Cautious voices remind us: "If the point of ELPS is to shrink work so that more articles of general interest can be published, then the BMJ must ensure that `cyberwork' receives the same degree of recognition as work in the original journal" (A Rashid). J O'Keefe worries that "the fruits of [the authors'] labour will ... disappear into cyberspace within a couple of years."

Editors' reply

Although the response to our editorial was generally positive, research among readers shows that many are wary of ELPS. Nevertheless, we think that the arguments for proceeding with the experiment are strong. Our hope, even expectation, is that both readers and authors will like ELPS once they get used to it. We plan to continue experimenting with different ways of shortening articles for the paper version of the journal, and we have thought of about seven different ways of doing so, some extreme some moderate. We may well include examples of all the different methods in a future edition of the journal. The shorter versions are identifiable both on the website and in the paper journal by the inclusion of the term (abridged) at the end of the citation.

Tony Delamothe, web editor. 
Marcus Müllner, editorial registrar. 
Richard Smith, editor. 
BMJ