New Feature: MSRJ e-Publications

epub early access picture

MSRJ’s Exciting New Feature!

The staff of MSRJ is extremely pleased to announce the addition of an exciting new feature to our journal! Starting today, we will be launching MSRJ e-Publication, which will be our first ever early-access publication issue. MSRJ e-publication will enable us to publish articles “online before print” as many other journals do. This new feature has many advantages for our student contributors including:

  • Faster publishing time for accepted manuscripts
  • Increased ease of access
  • Greater longevity of published literature
  • Assignment of a unique Digital Object Identifier number

We want to express our appreciation and thanks to the authors who have been instrumental in getting this put together. We invite you to take a look at their articles in our first-ever e-Pub Early Access Issue:

 

Combating Obstacles to Empathy: A Replicable Small Group Discussion Series for Medical Students.

Authors: Francesca P. Kingery, M.S., Alexander Bajorek, M.D. M.A., Amber Zimmer Deptola, M.D. Karen Hughes Miller, Ph.D., Craig Ziegler Ph.D., Pradip D. Patel M.D.

Medals4Mettle: A Program to Enhance the Medical Student-Patient Bond

Authors: McKenzie Vater MS3, Pradip D. Patel MD, Kanyalakshmi Ayyanar, MD, Autumn Marks, RN BSN CPHON, Craig Ziegler, PhD, Karen Hughes Miller,PhD

Does Traditional Chinese Medicine Matter? Medical Choices of Rural Diabetic Patients in Changsha, China.

Authors: Xiaoyue Mona Guo, B.A., Shuiyuan Xiao, M.D., Ph.D.

Time to Neurological Deterioration in Ischemic Stroke.

Authors: James E. Siegler, MD; Karen C. Albright, DO, MPH; Alexander J. George, BS; Amelia K. Boehme, MSPH; Michael A. Gillette, MPH; Andre D. Kumar, MD; Monica Aswani MSPH; Sheryl Martin-Schild, MD, PhD

 

What is e-Publication?

With MSRJ ePubs, not only will student authors be able to see their manuscripts published earlier, but each article will be assigned an individual Digital Object Identifier (DOI) number. A DOI number is a unique alphanumeric string assigned to a digital object. The DOI number is then registered with CrossRef.org, which is an official DOI registration agency dedicated to providing reliable and efficient reference linking for online scholarly material.

Each DOI uniquely identifies the article and provides a permanent link that takes readers to that particular electronic document, even if the web address which originally hosted the article changes.

These DOI’s already exist in various online journals such as JAMA and NEJM. They also provide ease of citation since they provide a short, easy, and unchanging link to the original document as opposed to a lengthy web address.

 

What Does This Mean for Student Contributors?

The use of DOIs enables us to safely publish intellectual property on the internet, prior to print, and without fear of plagiarism. The fact that DOIs are registered with Crossref © makes them permanent, so our student authors will always be able to find their articles, even many years down the road, using just that unique identifier. Finally, it makes these articles easy to reference, for any future researchers.

At any point in the future, people can access an article just by typing doi.org/ followed by the DOI number. This will automatically take you to wherever the article is housed at that time. It’s that simple!

Starting from today onwards, accepted manuscripts which have been prepared for e-Publication will be available for viewing under the new tab “ePubs” under “Publications” on the MSRJ website. Once we are off the ground, our MSRJ Tech Team will continue to work with the Executive Editors to format and prepare accepted manuscripts for e-Publication, and will continue fine-tuning the process to ensure smooth and continuous e-Publishing.

 

Behind the Scenes Work:

We would like to extend a special thanks our wonderful MSRJ Tech Team for their endless energy and tireless work towards getting e-Publication launched and helping our journal continue to grow. This has been no small feat, and we could not have done it without them! Leading the charge are Danny Yau and Danielle Levy, second-year medical students at MSU-CHM. They have been instrumental in designing the MSRJ template for our e-Publications, getting the MSRJ set up to accept and publish e-Publications, andestablishing the procedure for assigning DOIs to our manuscripts for future online publication.

We would also like to thank our faculty advisors, Dr. Luz and Dr. Trottier, for their support in helping us coordinate this transition to e-Publication.

 

Final Words:

As the longest-running journal run by medical students for medical students, we at the MSRJ strive to provide the highest quality product and experience for our student contributors. We hope that the addition of e-Publication will provide medical students another platform to promote their scholarship and research. and would like to thank our authors for their great submissions, support, and patience as we transition into this new phase.