Woody Guthrie was an outspoken American folk singer with a strong social conscience and populist message about the lives of millions in the United States during the Great Depression. In Woody Guthrie: Ain't Got No Home, he told us, "Life has got a habit of not standing hitched. You got to ride it like you find it. You got to change with it. If a day goes by that don't change some of your old notions for new ones, that is just about like trying milk a dead cow." This pithy statement describes the changes that are a part of our daily lives; the world, even in the 1920s and 1930s, shifted and moved quickly, and Woody cautioned us about the futility of not moving with it.
During 2008, we celebrated 40 years of publishing and the many contributors to Journal of Neuroscience Nursing (JNN) that made it possible. As we start 2009, we begin not just a 41st year of publishing but instead a year that will forever change us. JNN, with the encouragement and support of the American Association of Neuroscience Nurses (AANN), will now be published by Lippincott Wilkins and Williams (LWW). After months of careful planning, the change is here. We are changing our "old notions" of professional publishing to match the "new notions" that will move us forward. We join a renowned publishing house that will support the expansion and dissemination of neuroscience knowledge in ways we could no longer do alone.
JNN will be available electronically as well as in print so that readers can add us to their "bricks and mortar" libraries or their electronic ones. We will soon be able to preview articles of particular interest or importance before they appear in print. Readers will be able to create individual Web-based catalogs of articles related to their own needs and interests or to those of the patients and families for whom they care.
And although I shouldn't publicly admit that technologic wizardry is not a part of my daily life, I can appreciate it. Publishing JNN under the LWW umbrella provides us with the ability to integrate video clips, sound, EEG recordings, CT scans, and other media into our articles. As we move ahead, we will be able to see a seizure or visualize the shifting colors as metabolic changes become evident in a functional magnetic resonance image. You will be able to watch, and try identify, tremors, tics, and gait changes. Speech changes will be audible. Another significant change encompasses the ways in which authors submit manuscripts, peers review them, and decisions are communicated; we will use Editorial Manager (EM), a Web-based program that will end our use of e-mail as the vehicle for managing JNN's content. Authors can log directly onto the Web site, register, and use the tutorial to submit manuscripts. EM also allows an author to track the status of a manuscript at any point in the process. Our EM Web address is http://www.editorialmanager.com/neuronurse.
Our work with LWW will also help us create more educational opportunities linked directly to not only JNN but to other professional journals as well. The LWW educational site, Nursing Center.com, will allow our readers to manage and document their online educational efforts for certification, licensure, and promotion or just to make tracking professional growth easier. We will have the ability to partner with our nursing peers to plan and write synergistic manuscripts that expand our horizons. We will also be able to more fully take advantage of the professional literature of our nonnursing neuroscience colleagues.
Our visibility will change. Strong marketing should increase our name recognition and "brand." JNN will be marketed at many other professional nursing conferences, through direct mail, and online. The cover of JNN has been redesigned to more clearly highlight the content, the continuing education offering, and our name and logo. Inside pages are shaded to draw the reader's attention to key concepts of each article.
We will look a little different. You'll reach us a little differently. We will incorporate a fair amount of wizardry. We will, however, remain the written face of neuroscience nursing professionals. We will change-but, the more things change, the more they will remain the same.