News Archive

Brant Ulsh, CHP, PhD, Health Physics Editor in Chief

At the Health Physics Journal, we go the extra mile to ensure that our authors have a positive experience publishing their work with us. Editorial Assistant Deanna Baker and Managing Editor Mary Gene Ryan are well known to our authors. These two ladies come alongside our authors—especially first-time authors and our senior authors who can find navigating through the required electronic systems challenging—and guide them through what can otherwise be an intimidating and exasperating process.

Now we are taking initiatives to make the process less of a chore. First, we are adopting a "hassle-free submissions" policy. This means that authors can submit their manuscripts to the Health Physics Journal in whatever format they find convenient. Do you have a paper that didn't make it into Science or Nature, in the format those journals require, and now you want to submit it to Health Physics? No need to completely reformat the paper—just send it in to us. If the paper is accepted for publication, then we will ask authors to put their paper into our format, but there is no need to expend that effort before you even know if your paper will be accepted for publication in Health Physics. Similarly, for those papers that don't find a home in Health Physics and authors want to submit them to another journal, they won't have to expend the effort to put their manuscript into Health Physics format, all for naught.

When we described this policy to our Editorial Board, Bill Bailey sent me an article (Kozlov M., Revealed: the millions of dollars in time wasted making papers fit journal guidelines, Nature, 08 June 2023) that discussed the billions of dollars scientists are wasting reformatting their papers. We feel even better about this policy knowing we are part of the solution.

A second part of this initiative, spearheaded by Deanna, Mary Gene, and Publishing Representative Sharon Zinner, is to streamline and minimize the forms that are required for some kinds of submissions (e.g., Letters to the Editor, Author Responses, Book Reviews, etc.).

This is just part of our ongoing campaign to make Health Physics your first choice for publishing your work.

See the August issue of Health Physics here.