In This Issue

Abstract

The AVJ is undergoing some major changes. As the new Editor-in-Chief, I would like to congratulate Anne Jackson and thank her for the last fourteen years of editorship. Anne was head-hunted to be Scientific Editor of AVA’s flagship journal in 2005 and has overseen major change in that time. One of her early tasks was to move the AVJ from a reviewing system that used a DOS-based database and involved posting each paper an average of 8 times between reviewers and authors, to the online Manuscript Central platform, and working with Wiley to get all the back issues from 1925 digitised and fully on-line from 2008. During her tenure, Anne oversaw the AVJ going online, and the last edition she edited was the first ‘non-print’ issue in the new modern format. Anne has been popular and thoughtful editor. Along with Kerry Brown, she has used her copy-editing skills to help many authors bring papers up to the high standard required for publication in a peer reviewed journal and I know they have the gratitude and respect of many authors. Anne continues as an Associate Editor of the AVJ and I would like to publicly thank her for her guidance and support over the transition period and beyond. Readers will notice a new section in the last two editions of the AVJ – Conference proceedings. This time we are highlighting papers are the Australian Veterinary Antimicrobial Stewardship Conference 2018. According to the Chair of the organising committee, Dr KA Hewson, the conference was designed to bring together stakeholders who wanted, or needed, to gain a better understanding of what ‘AMS’ looks like in the Australian animal sector, to provide an opportunity for us to learn from international AMS experts and to build networks of similarly interested stakeholders in the animal AMS field. An important part of the scientific process is for researchers to present their work at conferences. This allows for peer discussion and review, often at an early stage of the research. There is a considerable body of useful research that that gets presented at a conference, and then is never written up properly for publication. This is a missed opportunity as conference proceedings often never become publicly available outside the AVA membership. There is also a concern of authors, that publication at a conference can preclude later publication in a journal. Please consider submitting your original research to the AVJ! As of July, we have activated the online ‘Early View’ system for articles that have been accepted, are in press, but have not yet been allocated to a specific journal. This is now common practice in peer reviewed journals. Articles in press are citable, have a DOI and are indexed along with published articles. We expect that manuscripts will start appearing in ‘Early view’ a small number of days after the Authors have approved the layout, which will reduce the time to publication by a number of weeks.