Elsevier announces the launch of the International Journal of Surgery Protocols

Elsevier, a world-leading provider of scientific, technical, and medical information products and services, today announced the launch of the International Journal of Surgery Protocols (IJS Protocols), an open access journal covering all areas of surgery. The journal will be the first in the surgical field to accept research protocols and related articles and correspondence for publication. The journal is accepting submissions from May 2016 onwards and will begin publishing articles in June 2016.

IJS Protocols will be edited by Dr. Riaz Agha, Director of IJS Publishing Group. Dr. Agha commented on the need for this new journal: "We need to know what works and what doesn't in order to drive higher quality research in the right direction, aid collaboration, and prevent duplication and wasted resources. Other issues our community grapples with are underpowered studies, poor statistical methods, poor reproducibility and external validity, and poor methodology and reporting of studies. Publishing protocols brings the focus away from the results themselves to the research questions, the hypothesis and the robustness of the methodology used to investigate it. Peer-review of protocols will allow for independent external feedback at an important early stage and for course corrections that could save significant time, money and resources spent on a study that was asking the wrong research question or which deployed the wrong methodology or both. We hope that the surgical community will support this new journal."

Guided by an editorial board of experts in the field, the journal will publish protocols, related editorials, and commentaries on topics across the surgical spectrum. Authors publishing in IJS Protocols will benefit from rapid review and their papers will be available open access on http://www.ijsprotocols.com and ScienceDirect.

IJS Protocols joins four sister journals also published by Elsevier on behalf of IJS Publishing Group: International Journal of Surgery (which also has a Chinese edition), International Journal of Surgery Open (open access), International Journal of Surgery Case Reports (open access), and the Annals of Medicine and Surgery (open access).

Andrew Berin, Publishing Director at Elsevier, commented, "We are extremely pleased to add this unique journal to our surgery portfolio and are confident of its success. With its launch our intention is to introduce a valuable new service for authors and readers across the surgical community, and to provide a resource to support the publication of high-quality surgical research."

For more information or to submit an article, visit: http://www.ijsprotocols.com.

Provided by Elsevier