The end of browsing, continuous publication, and title scrutiny

Medical Physics has changed the way articles are published. In the past, once accepted after peer review, manuscripts were signed off by the authors (in the galley proof stage), they underwent final markup by the publisher, were queued up during the month and near the end of the month, that monthly issue was published. In each monthly issue, containing from 30 to 70 articles, the articles were placed in appropriate categories (selected by the authors during manuscript submission) such as Quantitative Imaging and Image Processing, Emerging Imaging and Therapy Modalities, Computational and Experimental Dosimetry, and so on. This categorical organization allowed readers to browse the topics that they were interested in. In the era of print-only publication, a medical physicist might find some uninterrupted time to skim through the paper journal—fan the pages, check out this month's offerings, see who was publishing and on what topic—maybe even read two or three articles that were of interest. A seat on a jet airplane was one of our favorite places to browse the journal. Alas, this kind of relaxed browsing went away with the demise of the printed page. When the journal went online only (Volume 51 in January 2024), the process was basically the same as with the print journal; however, flipping the printed page was replaced with a less aesthetic electronic scroll through the website. Nevertheless, the articles were still arranged in categories which allowed the readers to perform a more targeted review of the Table of Contents, and a mouse click got you to an article of interest if you were logged in. Now, this too has changed. Wiley, our publisher, has moved to a new continuous publication model for the journal—and this is apparently consistent with the way the publishing industry is going. With the continuous publication model, as soon as accepted articles are signed off by the authors (after galley proof corrections) and receive final markup by the publisher, they are placed into a continuous stream of articles in the online viewing portal. The articles are no longer placed in the various categories as before; their arrangement is no longer a neatly arranged Table of Contents, but rather the order of articles on the website is simply a temporal stream as they are finalized by Wiley. So, the articles are extruded onto the website continuously, with the article feed severed at the end of the month to allow for the concept of “Monthly Issues” to endure. No more browsing the categories—they are gone as a means of organizing articles as of April 1, 2026, and while some previous issues will still have the associated category indicated above each article, more recently we have done away with listing scientific categories altogether since they provide no organizational function. So, with the move to a continuous publication model, the notion of browsing the Medical Physics journal is largely lost. One can scroll through the articles in the Table of Contents, but their order will be arbitrary in terms of scientific category—making a targeted browse in a certain category (e.g., Computational and Experimental Dosimetry) impossible. It's like reading the newspaper and having an article on Sports, followed by an article on International News, followed by an Obituary, then another Sports article, and so on. Why are we eliminating the ability to browse our journal? There have been studies performed by our publisher Wiley on how readers get to a certain article, and (in general) it's not by browsing. Something like 85% of readers are using Google, Google Scholar, or some other browser to find specific articles of interest. With this statistic, scientists and researchers can more easily find an article that they are looking for using search engines. However, without a convenient mechanism for browsing, they will never come across an interesting article that they are not looking for. It turns out that the submitted manuscript title becomes embedded into the metadata associated with the manuscript, and if that manuscript is accepted it is then very difficult to correct the title. As editors, we feel that an article's title is a very important hook that should be used by authors to attract potential readers to their published work, and therefore the title should be as salient, brief, and informative as it could be. Eliminating the textual clutter also cleans up the Table of Contents, for those who peruse that. The addition of arbitrary text, even acronyms, which are only meaningful to the authors, should be avoided. Standard acronyms in the field of radiology and radiation oncology, such as CT, VMAT, MRI, LET, MLC, and so on, can be used, if necessary, in the title. Authors are free to designate new acronyms in the abstract and text of the article. Heretofore, we have spent considerable effort to send those manuscripts back to the authors (i.e., editorial decision deferred, major revision with full peer review) with specific instructions to delete these labels. Most authors have complied, and their manuscript was then forwarded to the peer review process with a less cluttered and more informative title. We will not be providing this title correction service in the future. Manuscripts which have arbitrary groupings of letters and numbers will be rejected outright, with the chance for resubmission as a new manuscript—one with a conforming title. This policy will be implemented May 1, 2026.