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With a spirit of adventure-and much encouragement from our parent Medical World Communications-Decisions in Axis Imaging News will step up to a monthly schedule with the July issue.
I would like to tell you that we received scores of email from readers beseeching us to produce more issues and repeated requests from vendors asking for more frequency so they could spend more advertising dollars with us-but that would not be true. However, I honestly can report that our relationship with our readers is strong and growing. I do get scores of emails from readers, but they frequently are looking for past articles. We published seven issues last year and had intended to publish nine this year. When our parent asked us to produce a tenth issue, we decided it was time to stop inching into the bigger pond and simply take the plunge to publishing on a monthly schedule.
Time may bear witness to the wisdom of this choice; presently, I can offer only the reasoning behind it:
1. Simplicity. 12 X 1 publishing is one of those elegantly simple equations. There are 12 months in a year, and to publish one issue for each of them is a pattern most people are familiar and comfortable with. While our previous bimonthly schedule, with one issue for every 2 months, also made sense, seven issues, nine issues, and 10 issues all present different degrees of confusion. Readers no longer will have to guess when Decisions in Axis Imaging News will show up in their mail boxes: It will arrive once a month at evenly spaced intervals.
2. A competitive choice. When one journal publishes 12 times a year and another publishes less frequently, then the journal with less frequency is at a competitive disadvantage for advertising dollars. It is not unlike the choice a group or department makes to go to 24 x 7 radiology coverage. If you do not fulfill that need, someone else will. The difference, of course, is that, while some journals have nobler missions than others, we in publishing do not save lives.
3. Manifest Destiny. Until we arrived at monthly publishing, it would always be there beckoning to the publishing powers that be.
Growth comes with a certain nostalgia for the past. Some of you will recall the days when we were an esoteric journal with a rather limited appeal to those academics, executives, and entrepreneurs engaged in managing the cost, quality, and delivery of imaging. We have not changed what we are doing as much as you, our readers, have. Today more radiologists and their administrator partners are taking an active role in these important activities.
Will the journal change? Yes and no is the answer. We will maintain our original mission to address the challenges of managing the cost, quality, and delivery of imaging. But with your input and the expert guidance of our editorial advisory board, we plan to always change as you must change to meet the demands of the evolving field of radiology.
Our job is to raise the lantern, and let the light shine where it must. From July on, Decisions in Axis Imaging News will do that every month.
Cheryl Proval
