This post is part of a series explaining aspects of the author instructions (see also the checklist) for Health Services Research (HSR) as they existed circa March 2022. Each post quotes portions of the instructions and explains their import. Neither these posts nor the checklist are a substitute for reading and following the full set of instructions, which is expected of all authors for all submissions.
This post focuses on portions of Sections 6-9, all pertaining to post-acceptance issues and opportunities.
Section 6.1: “HSR is a subscription journal that offers an open access option. … Check if your funders mandate use of a particular type of CC license. If so, Wiley has information on compliance with specific Funder Open Access Policies. Your country or institution may have an agreement with Wiley to help with open access. See details and check eligibility on the Wiley website…”
Long story short, before deciding whether or not to make your article open access and before paying for it, check the links above. In addition, typically articles in special issues of HSR are open access, with the open access fee paid by the sponsors of those issues. So, if you’re submitting to a special issue, don’t pay the open access fee until you’ve checked with or heard from the editors whether the sponsor will cover it.
Section 7.2: “HSR offers Wiley’s Accepted Articles service for all manuscripts. Manuscripts accepted ‘in press’ are published online shortly after acceptance, before copyediting or typesetting … Accepted Articles will be indexed by PubMed … HSR offers rapid publication [of typeset articles] via Wiley’s Early View service, [which is the] Online Version of Record [and appears] before inclusion in a print or online issue. … The Early View article is fully citable and carries an online publication date and the same DOI as the Accepted Article version.”
In other words, we get your accepted article online within days* in the final form you submitted it. This is so you can start referring colleagues, journalists, policymakers, your parents, etc. to it just after acceptance. Then, we go through the typesetting/proofs process to make a “pretty” version, which goes online as soon as that’s ready (typically a few weeks after acceptance*). Only later (possibly months) is your article added to an issue; it won’t differ in appearance from the previously posted online version except that when printed in the bound, paper issue, all figures will be black & white. The DOI is already set in the Accepted Article stage and remains constant.
Section 8.4: “Send Twitter account information for authors, funders, and authors’ affiliation to hsr@social.aha.org to help us promote your work @HSR_HRET.”
Please do this! While we will independently promote your work, our resources to do so are modest. Every bit more you can do helps. To the email address above, you can also send any other promotional information, like press releases, blog posts, Twitter threads, webinar announcements, or anything else related to your paper. We want to help you get the word out about your work.
That’s the end of this selective tour through the HSR author instructions.
* Sometimes it takes longer if we don’t have the necessary meta-data to go along with your article (e.g., copyright forms and the like). You’ll be contacted to provide this and the pace at which we can get your article processed depends on how quickly you respond.
