Primary Care Respiratory Journal 2000 – 2014
The Primary Care Respiratory Journal (PCRJ), September 2000 – March 2014
Achieving Medline/Index Medicus listing, 2000 - 2006
From September 2000 the journal was published in-house by the GPIAG Editorial Office provided by Red Hot Irons – the agency that provides operational support to the GPIAG, managed by Tricia Bryant. There were four hard copy issues of the PCRJ in 2000 as well as two published supplements – one produced for the first International Primary Care Respiratory Conference held at Robinson College, Cambridge in June, and the second containing a number of papers focussing on the international management of respiratory disease. The international conference was highly significant, since it led to the formation of a new international group, the International Primary Care Respiratory Group (IPCRG). Throughout 2000 and 2001 the international profile of the journal increased, with a steady increase in the size of the International Editorial Advisory Board and an increased number of international papers accepted for publication.
At the same time, there were significant changes for the GPIAG. In January 2001 the GPIAG shed its single-sponsor status, and two months later John Haughney became the Chairman of the Steering Committee – and he therefore relinquished his PCRJ Assistant Editor role and was replaced by Aziz Sheikh. John went on to lead a re-structuring of the GPIAG, and in January 2002 it became a registered company and a charity with a Board of Trustees. The Steering Committee became the ‘Executive Committee’.
In 2002, the PCRJ became the official journal of the IPCRG, a role that npjPCRM still fulfils to this day. The journal continued as a quarterly hard copy publication (with papers also available online) throughout 2002 and 2003, with each issue now containing approximately 32 pages of content. The Editorial Board continued to expand, and now had an International Editorial Board of 18 members as well as the Editor-in-Chief and four Assistant Editors.
In 2004, in order to increase the profile of the journal, the PCRJ had a new publisher – Elsevier, a world-renowned publishing company. Under the new arrangement, the journal became a subscription-based journal available to anyone who wished to purchase it, but the GPIAG and IPCRG purchased copies for its members. Manuscript submissions increased, so that each quarterly issue now contained about 60 pages of content, with a mix of invited editorials, reviews, discussion papers, case reports, correspondence, and a News section containing details of the GPIAG and the IPCRG.
In 2005, following a nearly threefold increase in manuscript submissions over the preceding two years, the journal increased to a bi-monthly publication with six issues a year each containing between 50 and 60 pages.
The first issue of 2006 was highly significant. The whole 74-page issue was devoted entirely to the first IPCRG guidelines for the management of chronic respiratory diseases in primary care, together with accompanying editorials written by world experts. For the first time, worldwide primary care guidelines had been published for the diagnosis and management of asthma, COPD and chronic rhinitis, together with papers on the integration of diagnostic guidelines and their dissemination. These papers eventually became some of the highest-cited papers ever published by the journal.
Just as the IPCRG guidelines were being published, there was more good news: the PCRJ was awarded full Medline/Index Medicus listing in February 2006, and this status was granted to all PCRJ papers from January 2004 onwards. This was a highly significant achievement for the journal. The requirements for acceptance by the NLM/Medline Committee onto the Medline database are stringent, and this demonstrated that the PCRJ was now recognised as a high quality academic journal of international significance.
The benefits of Medline listing were immediately apparent. By the end of 2006 there had been a 65% increase in manuscript submissions compared to the previous year. However, it was clear that for the benefits of Medline listing to be fully realised the journal needed to provide free access to its papers online without any charge for readers or authors. In addition, there needed to be free hard copies of the journal for GPIAG members. The agreement with Elsevier was therefore terminated.
Free online access, more manuscript submissions, more citations, 2007 – 2010
For the next two years the journal was published by Sherborne Gibbs. There were regular hard copies for PCRS members, as well as a new website providing free worldwide online access to all papers. Sherborne Gibbs was responsible for most of the cost of journal production and publication, and looked to recoup its investment by article reprint sales and pharma company advertising in the hard copy journal.
2007 was the 20th anniversary of the founding of the GPIAG. The journal published a review of the organisation’s development and influence on the management of respiratory diseases over the previous 20 years as well as an international perspective of the GPIAG’s impact.
There were six issues of the PCRJ in 2007, each about 64 pages in length. In 2008 the journal reverted to a quarterly publication with a total of 250 pages of content but two supplements were also published – the first on the recently published national strategy for COPD, and the second was a summary of the 2008 BTS/SIGN guideline on asthma management.
Manuscript submissions continued to increase (100 in 2007; 124 in 2008) and there was a 65% increase in citations over the two-year period. Figures from the independent academic research organisation SCImago published in 2008 showed an increase in the SCImago journal rank from 0.071 to 0.139, and a 2-year citation index (akin to the Thomson Reuters Impact factor) of 1.89.
Things were not all plain-sailing though. As with any rapidly developing journal, potential conflicts were bound to occur at some point. In 2007 there was a disagreement between the publisher, GPIAG and the editors regarding the potential publication of a pharma-sponsored supplement, which (in the editors’ eyes) involved the fundamental issue of editorial independence. The Editor-in-Chief and the other editors were adamant that editorial independence must prevail in this instance. The disagreement was resolved by much patient discussion. The outcome was a much clearer and transparent system of journal governance by the journal owner (GPIAG), and much clearer guidelines for the publisher/owner/editor relationship, with monitoring provided by a newly-formed Journal Management Committee (JMC) comprising representatives from all three parties as well as the IPCRG.
In 2009 the publishing arrangement with Sherborne Gibbs ended, and after a 5-year interval the journal reverted back to being published in-house by the GPIAG. The journal continued as a quarterly hard copy publication, with free online access to all papers, and there were 347 pages of content during the year. The Editorial Board had developed considerably, and now consisted of the Editor-in-Chief, a Deputy Editor, three Assistant Editors, an IPCRG and a GPIAG representative, and an International Editorial Board of 40 world experts in primary and secondary care respiratory medicine from nearly 20 different countries.
2010 was another significant year for the GPIAG. The charity’s name was changed to the ‘Primary Care Respiratory Society UK’ (PCRS UK), a name which reflected the increased diversity of the society’s membership, the majority of whom were no longer GPs but were nurses, physiotherapists, pharmacists, and other healthcare professionals. The year was also significant for the journal. After 15 years as the Editor-in-Chief, Mark Levy had decided it was time to ‘hang up his red pen’. After an open recruitment process, Aziz Sheikh and Paul Stephenson made a combined application to be Joint Editors-in-Chief. They were duly interviewed by a panel which included Trustees, the Chief Executive, and an external expert (Wisia Wedzicha, the editor of Thorax), and they were appointed as Mark’s successors with effect from January 2011. Mark wrote a farewell editorial in the final issue of the year, giving thanks to everyone who had helped the journal on its journey, and neatly summarising his great achievement in transforming a society newsletter into a highly regarded international academic journal.
New Editors-in-Chief, achieving an Impact factor, and the need to move to a new business model, 2011 – March 2014
The new Editors-in-Chief started their tenure with an editorial paying tribute to Mark Levy for his outstanding leadership over the previous 15 years and they also outlined their plans for the future. Foremost among these was a weekly Editors meeting to pre-screen manuscript submissions (during which up to 40% of submissions were rejected immediately), the appointment of 15 new Associate Editors to act as handling editors for those papers going out for peer review, and an increase in the number of invited editorials written by recognised experts in the field in order to put original research papers into context. In addition, Gopal Netuveli was appointed as the Statistics editor, which meant that all quantitative papers provisionally accepted for publication received a detailed statistical review prior to publication. Several new International Editorial Board members were appointed to add further expertise to the Board.
Throughout 2011, these changes led to a reduction in manuscript handling times which increased the attractiveness of the PCRJ for authors looking for a journal to which they could submit their work. By the end of the year, the average time from submission to first editorial decision had been reduced to 22 days, and the average time from submission to final decision was 33 days. There was a steady increase in original research submissions compared to the previous year (101 compared to 76 in 2010), and an increase in published content to 465 pages in the year. The SCImago 2-year citation index was now 2.11. This meant that the Editors’ final plan could now be put into action – an application to Thomson Reuters ISI for inclusion in their database and for the awarding of an ‘Impact factor’.
Two further developments helped increase the relevance of the journal for readers. A ‘Journalwatch’ section featuring summaries of important respiratory papers in other journals was started. The summaries were written by Paul Stephenson and edited by Aziz Sheikh, originally for Doctors.net (who commissioned PCRS to provide them), who then gave permission for them to be published in the journal two to three months later. Secondly, Hilary Pinnock and Jaime Correia de Sousa were appointed as editors of a new section entitled ‘education@pcrj’ containing articles written for practising clinicians.
2012 was a year of great success. In April, news was received that the PCRJ had been accepted by Thomson Reuters ISI for inclusion in its citation index listing and that the journal had been awarded an Impact factor. Thomson Reuters selects only the top journals in the world for its database. Journals have to apply to be listed, and have to fulfil numerous criteria including high quality of peer review and manuscript handling, a high quality editorial board, and regular citation of published papers. The ‘Impact factor’ is calculated by measuring the average number of citations (in other Thomson Reuters ISI journals) received in that year for each article published by the journal in the preceding two years. The size of the Impact factor relative to other journals in the field is a measure of the importance (or ‘impact’) of that journal. For the PCRJ, the first Impact factor for 2012 (average citations in 2012 achieved by papers published in 2010 and 2011) was to be published in June 2013.
In 2013, the journal continued to develop. Submissions of research papers increased by 12%, the acceptance rate for submissions was 31.6%, and manuscript handling times remained competitive at 25 days from submission to first decision and 35.5 days to final decision. A further nine Associate Editors were appointed to help handle the increased workload. Content for the year increased to 484 pages. In June we received notification of the 2012 Impact factor, the journal’s first ever. It was 2.19. This meant that the PCRJ was ranked second amongst all primary care journals worldwide and was ranked 30/50 in respiratory journals.
However, this success occurred at a time when the existing business model of free publication for authors and free access to readers, with funding based on article reprint sales and pharma company adverts in the hard copy issue, looked to be increasingly non-viable. Reprint sales had been poor in 2010, had rebounded in 2011, but then reduced markedly during 2012. The chairman of the PCRS Executive at this time was Iain Small, who several years earlier (when the journal was going through some difficulties in 2007/2008) had famously declared that ‘the PCRJ is not going down on my watch!’ In October 2013, an Expert Working Party was convened to discuss the journal’s future. The group included the PCRS Chief Executive Anne Smith, the Chairman of Trustees Patrick White, the two Editors-in-Chief, Editorial Board representatives (and former GPIAG Executive Committee Chairs) John Haughney and Dermot Ryan, and two external experts – Richard Smith, former editor of the BMJ, and Wisia Wedzicha, editor of Thorax. After very fruitful discussion, the decision was made to seek expert advice, to initiate a tendering process to seek a new journal publisher, and to involve the IPCRG fully in these discussions.
Following the Working Party meeting, an expert publishing consultant was contracted to review the PCRJ from a business perspective and to construct a long list of prospective publishers. These publishers were then contacted, provided with a detailed profile of the journal, and invited to tender for the publication rights. After assessing the quality of applications against various agreed criteria (including open access to papers and reduced financial risk for the PCRS), five publishers were shortlisted and interviewed, and Nature Publishing Group (NPG) were the preferred choice by far. The decision was made to enter into a publishing agreement with NPG as from April 1st 2014
In the final ever issue of the PCRJ, published in March 2014, the Editors-in-Chief announced the new publishing agreement, thanking all those people who had brought the agreement to fruition, and in particular paying tribute to Tricia Bryant and her team in the PCRJ editorial office for their superb work over the years.