Introducing…

The Editors of The American Journal of Gastroenterology are excited to announce the new hassle-free policy for initial submissions.

Authors can submit articles without formatting for every article type. This format-free approach will reduce the workload for authors who have already spent time researching and writing the manuscript.

Tables, figures, and supplementary material can all be included in a single submission file, with images embedded into the text. Files can be uploaded as Word documents or PDFs.

The editorial office will not send any manuscripts back for changes unless there is content missing, such as a table or figure. This means less emails in your inbox for moving a table to the end of the document, adding line numbers, or even fixing spacing. We’ll read what you submit, as is.

If your article is selected for revision, the editors will ask that the Journal formatting requirements be followed for all subsequent versions.

Why?

The movement towards format-free submission has been building over the last decade, as journal editors recognize the amount of time spent researching and writing an article. A 2019 study in PLOS showed that median formatting time was 14 hours per manuscript1. Other published studies show that reformatting requirements could delay a manuscript by at least 2 weeks2. While technology has accelerated the pace of science, it has led to a lag in publishing results3–perhaps due to how accessible the content and authors are to the editorial office. Journal offices can email authors for changes now that would not have been requested when hard copies were submitted previously.

Publishing is a vital way to spread important clinical information and we want our authors to focus on the science–not formatting. Additionally, we recognize that authors sometimes have to go journal shopping with their manuscripts. Requirements change journal to journal, and this will save authors from having to reconfigure the layout of their article. AJG’s hassle-free submission process erases the work of reformatting the document if an article was previously submitted to a non-ACG journal.

We hope this will help you the authors save time in submitting your work, and make AJG your go-to journal for publication.

Submit

AJG devotes itself to publishing timely medical research in gastroenterology and hepatology with:

Submit your article now through our online editorial system!

References

  1. Jiang Y, Lerrigo R, Ullah A, et al. The high resource impact of reformatting requirements for scientific papers. PLoS One 2019;14(10): e0223976.
  2. LeBlanc AG, Barnes JD, Saunders TJ, et al. Scientific sinkhole: The pernicious price of formatting. PLoS One 2019;14(9):e0223116.
  3. Vosshall LB. The glacial pace of scientific publishing: Why it hurts everyone and what we can do to fix it. FASEB J. 2012;26(9):3589-93.