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In the middle weeks of October 2002 the Journal of Neurophysiology first made available to its authors the option of publishing on-line the PDFs of the manuscripts accepted by the Journal. APS Articles in PresS, as this option is called, are citable, searchable in Medline, and will appear on-line within a week of the time that the article is accepted in final form by the Journal of Neurophysiology. The process works as follows. Articles are reviewed and revised using the on-line submission system, APS Central. When an article is revised, authors are asked to check whether they wish the manuscript to be considered for Articles in PresS. If an author so indicates, when the manuscript is finally accepted, the author is asked to upload a manuscript formatted appropriately to be uploaded onto the High Wire site for the Journal of Neurophysiology. This makes the text and figures of the reviewed and accepted work available to the community virtually immediately.

At the same time, the manuscript enters the conventional copyediting and production phases of the publication process. This process takes several months and results in published papers that conform more to the strictures of the English language and Journal of Neurophysiology format than do the manuscripts submitted by the authors. Additionally, the quality of the published figures will be in some cases higher than that of the PDFs published as APS Articles in PresS. After the paper is published in the print version and on-line, the final version will appear when searched, but the Articles in PresS version will be stored in an accessible archive. This creates a permanent record of both versions of the manuscript. The final version will be the one that is routinely searched and cited once it appears, although both versions remain citable.

We believe that this system combines the best of the old ways with the advantages provided by modern technology. The old ways produce a final, copyedited, and proofread published paper in which many minor errors have been caught and fixed. All of us have discovered and corrected errors while reading page proofs, and almost all manuscripts have mistakes in the references or errors in syntax that are usually caught during copyediting and proofreading by professionals. Obviously, we are always working to speed up all aspects of print journal production to reduce the time between acceptance and publication. Nonetheless, there are still inevitable parts of the conventional production process that take a good deal of time (even assuming that authors returned page proofs within the 48 h asked of them). The new ways allow us to make available very rapidly an accepted manuscript in a form as good as the authors can produce it, thus allowing the community to profit from the work as soon as it is accepted, without forcing us to compromise the quality of the final printed version.

Some authors work in fields that move extremely rapidly, and they feel very strongly about priority of publication. We are pleased that Articles in PresS will serve these authors well. Other authors may not feel the same sense of urgency, and they will choose to wait for the ordinary production process to publish their paper. Because Articles in PresS is optional, both constituencies are now well served.