A New Digital Look for JDSDE

Abstract

Some exciting changes are coming to the Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education (JDSDE) that should make the journal even more useful to readers, authors, and libraries. With electronic innovations happening now at Oxford University Press, new options and opportunities are being put into place. Perhaps most importantly for many readers and authors, papers accepted for publication will no longer have to wait until an entire issue is published in order to be available to the public. As soon as a manuscript is accepted by the editors, it will be typeset and posted on the JDSDE Web site. Known as Publish Ahead of Print and available via the Advance Access system, electronic versions of manuscripts are regarded as published and assigned a digital object identifier. The article then can be printed, cited, and accessed from HighWire, PubMed, or directly from the JDSDE Web site, http://www.deafed.oxfordjournals.org (soon to be remodeled and made available at http://www. jdsde.org). Another exciting option is that authors will be able to post ‘‘supplementary data’’ relevant to their research on the JDSDE Web site. Such data might involve appendixes that go beyond what would normally appear in print—perhaps scoring procedures, questionnaires, or illustrative transcripts. What makes this particularly important for JDSDE is that supplementary postings also can include either video or audio files. Investigators working with signed or spoken language, play behaviors, or mother–child (and other social) interactions will now have the opportunity to show readers the kinds of behaviors or procedures that underpin research findings. This option will be an important advance in a field that often cannot capture fine nuances of communication in print. (Imagine seeing video clips that explain these tough-to-understand sign language transcriptions!) Supplementary data must be submitted at the time of initial manuscript submission, and investigators will need permission from recognizable individuals appearing in the video footage—and do not forget clearance from ethical review panels, if necessary. Decisions concerning acceptance of a manuscript, however, will be independent of whether supplementary data are supplied or accepted for posting. Oxford Journals’ new Open Access feature, known as Oxford Open, offers JDSDE authors the option to pay for their articles to be made freely available online immediately upon publication. To learn more, read the Oxford Journals press release at http://www3. oup.co.uk/jnls/press/2005/05/04/index.html and register to receive information and updates about this initiative. Visitors to our Web site and readers of electronic full text may have already noticed a variety of other JDSDE upgrades. Portable document formats (PDFs) are now ‘‘framed,’’ meaning that information about the article being viewed and about the journal is available even if readers have not accessed the article through the Web site (e.g., if it has been e-mailed to them). PDFs also now will be ‘‘extended,’’ showing where they came from, when they were downloaded, and