From ELPS to hypER papers

EDITOR—The idea of introducing a dual publishing strategy—a short version in the paper journal and a longer version in the electronic journal1—is 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). …