Editor-in-Chief's Report

May 2000

A number of developments have taken place with the British Journal of Nutrition since my report in the autumn of last year. The Editorial Office has been reorganised and considerable progress has been made in substantially reducing the time taken to process manuscripts. In particular, we are well on the way towards achieving a time between receipt and first decision of 2-3 months; this is due especially to the efforts of members of the Editorial Board. Steps have also been taken to greatly reduce the time between acceptance of a manuscript and its final appearance in the Journal, with a target of 3 months having been agreed with CABI. Linked to this requirement is a change from ‘technical editing’ towards more conventional ‘copy editing’ of manuscripts.

A change of particular significance for the BJN is the move from copyright transfer to a “Licence to Publish”, as of July 2000. This means that our authors will retain the full copyright of their material and an Editorial on this appears in the July issue (Volume 84, No. 1). I am particularly pleased by this development, with the BJN and the other Nutrition Society journals being in the vanguard of what is expected to be a major shift in academic publishing in favour of authors. A further development that members will have noted is the introduction of colour plates, the first of which appeared in the March 2000 issue (Volume 83, No. 3).

I would also like to highlight that the contents page of the BJN is providing new subject sections, again from the July 2000 issue, and I believe these will better represent the diversity of modern nutritional science.

The momentum on the internationalisation of the Editorial Board has been maintained and I am pleased to report that we are in the process of appointing our first editors from Asia. As a further indication of the internationalisation of the BJN, the office of Editor-in-Chief will be located outside the UK for the first time, on my move to the University of Oslo in Norway.

Paul Trayhurn
Editor-in-Chief
British Journal of Nutrition