Continuity and Change

It is with great pleasure and pride that Maney looks forward to publishing the Journal of Manual & Manipulative Therapy (JMMT) from the beginning of 2010. We have come to an agreement with the current owners who have kindly allowed us to write this editorial in their last issue. JMMT was founded by Stanley Paris, Sharon Medeiros and John Medeiros in 1992, and following the ground-breaking first issue in December 1993, it has established itself as one of the premier journals for manual physical therapy. Our aim is to provide continuity and change and in doing so to deliver personalized service to authors, readers and libraries for the publishing and international dissemination of high quality, peer reviewed research. Specializing in print and electronic journal publishing, Maney is well known for technical and editorial innovation combined with traditional values of quality and collaboration. Formed in 1997 (from a printing company established in 1900), we publish over ninety journals, the majority on behalf of societies, universities and professional institutes. JMMT will continue to be the members' journal of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Manual Physical Therapists (AAOMPT), the Orthopaedic Manipulative Therapists of Australia, and the New Zealand Manipulative Physiotherapists Association. It is also the journal of choice for the Canadian Academy of Manipulative Physiotherapy. The Executive of AAOMPT has decided that from 2010 members will have online access to JMMT as part of the automatic benefits of membership, but will have to indicate on the membership renewal form if they wish to continue receiving a print copy of the journal. Dr. Chad Cook will continue to be the academic editor and we confidently expect to build on the fine work that he has done in the last few years. We will be establishing an Online Submission and Refereeing System, “Editorial Manager”, in the next few months, which will help Chad administer the editorial and refereeing process. It will also enable authors to track the progress of their papers; it can produce statistics on submissions, rejection rates, and the geographical provenance of accepted and rejected papers; and it streamlines the production of journals as accepted papers can be put into production without any further intervention from the editorial office. They will be passed automatically for copyediting and typesetting. The introduction of such systems usually has the welcome result of cutting refereeing times even if, as with JMMT, they are already good. JMMT will henceforth be published online with our technology partner, IngentaConnect, from which readers will be able to obtain Table of Contents (TOC) alerts for this and our other journals on physical therapy, for example Physical Therapy Reviews and International Musculoskeletal Medicine. All articles will be available in print and online. The other services that will be available include the ability to save searches so that they can be re-run at a later date; creating marked lists of articles that readers are interested in, with the option to either print or export in a suitable format for loading into a bibliographic management system, such as EndNote, Procite or Refworks. There are also several bookmarking options for sites such as delicious, CiteUlike and Connotea. When published online by Maney, JMMT will be included in Cross-Ref, the collaborative reference linking service used by participating publishers to enable readers to follow links from an article's references to the online content of the cited article, if that article is available in electronic format. A researcher clicking on a reference link will be connected to the corresponding journal or publisher's website, showing a full bibliographic citation of the article and, in most cases, an abstract. Linking works in two ways: linking out from the Maney content to other articles, and also ensuring linking into Maney journal content from other sites. For institutional subscribers there will be a complete back archive of all previously published issues of JMMT, and we expect to commission an article that will give an overview of the highlights and key developments of the journal. JMMT is indexed in PubMed Central and PubMed, and all our journals are crawled by Google and Google Scholar. It is with an awareness of our responsibility for JMMT that we wish to acknowledge the enormous contribution that John Medeiros has made to the journal since it was launched. He and Sharon, who died in 2002, and was also totally dedicated to the Journal, have been the foundation on which its professional and clinical aspirations have been successfully established. It is difficult to mention any one activity that John has been involved in; there have been so many. He has, quite simply, published JMMT with discretion, rigor and enthusiasm over many years.