Editorial
British Journal of Occupational Therapy
Notification of changes in BJOT publishing
Antonia Johnston1, Rod Lambert1
The British Journal of Occupational Therapy has had a his-
torical basis in being published in monthly issues. The current
strategy has emerged from previous developments which
have seen it move from being an ‘in-house’ publication,
through to having a formalised editorial board, and then
becoming part of a publishing group (Sage Publications).
This background demonstrates that the publishing landscape
is rarely static, and changes need to be made from time to time
to remain relevant and up-to-date. This Editorial provides
information about the next such change in the interests of the
journal remaining as transparent about our processes and
direction as possible.
We wish to reassure you that it will remain the journal you
know and love, with hopefully minimal impact on how you
interact with its contents. We anticipate that these changes
will modernise how the journal operates and presents the
work we publish. Over the last couple of years we have made
many similar ‘tweaks’ to editorial policies, such as our recent
introduction of Patient and Public Involvement data in
articles.
There are many different models of journal publishing. We
are sure you have noticed that in recent years increasing
numbers of journals have become an online-only publication.
This has moved publication away from the traditional print
model, partly in response to concerns over the impact on the
environment, and print being seen as increasingly obsolete
with falling circulation as readers choose to access research
digitally. BJOT has stuck largely to the print-publication
model, curating a monthly printed issue which anyone has
the option of purchasing while RCOT members receive an
online-only subscription as part of their membership. While
our print circulation is relatively low compared to our online
engagement, we do see its value to those who choose to
receive it.
This traditional way of doing things, however, has led to
us becoming increasingly out of step with how the majority of
our readers are accessing and engaging with our articles. In
this model, our articles are published shortly after being
accepted on our ‘Online First’ page, where anyone with
access can read and cite the research straight away. Articles
remain on this page until they are included in a print issue,
when they move into the relevant volume and issue. This
separation of articles can be confusing. In recent years,
having a fixed number of ‘pages’ to ensure a consistently
sized monthly print issue has meant that articles may spend
many months ‘Online First’ before being assigned their final
print citation, meaning the print issue no longer contains the
2022, Vol. 85(3) 155–156
© The Author(s) 2022
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/03080226221086167
journals.sagepub.com/home/bjot
latest and most cutting-edge articles. Fixed monthly page
budgets are also one limiting factor in how many articles we
can publish overall. This is increasingly outdated in a largely
digital world, and it no longer makes sense to build our
editorial policies around the printed page.
What we have decided at BJOT, in collaboration with our
publisher Sage, is to move to a ‘flexible page budget’ model.
This removes the monthly page requirements that we cur-
rently work within, where we assign articles to issues of
a defined size. Instead, articles will publish into the next
available issue and issues will be flexible in size – some may
be smaller, some larger, depending on what articles are ac-
cepted and when. This gives the editorial team flexibility to
focus on how we can work with authors to review and im-
prove their research content, by reducing the administration
involved in curating fixed-size print issues. It will also mean
a significantly shorter time between acceptance and ‘final’
publication, which will benefit many authors who rely on
their final citation for career advancement.
What this will mean in practice, is that the journal, starting
from now, will be publishing several ‘bumper’ issues to clear
our current backlog before officially moving to our new way
of working. If you receive a monthly issue ToC for BJOT, you
might notice this is considerably longer than usual. However,
we do not anticipate that the changes will have a dramatic
effect on how the journal looks or operates. We will not lose
control of the careful editorial curation that we have now. Our
2020 strategy (Lambert, 2020) to raise the levels of evidence
published in BJOT, and our strategy regarding increasing the
quality of published review articles (Unsworth, 2020) are
both still in place and form the backbone of editorial decisions
made at the article level. Flexibility to publish more articles
one month does not mean being indiscriminate in what we
publish – only that we have the space to publish every high-
quality article that we receive and are less limited by page
counts. We also retain ultimate control over special issues,
editorials and all other types of content.
We welcome all feedback on our journal and encourage
you to send any queries as always to bjoteditorial@rcot.co.uk.
These changes are minor but form an important part of
modernising how we work alongside the other pillars of our
1
Royal College of Occupational Therapists, London, UK
Corresponding author:
Antonia Johnston, British Journal of Occupational Therapy, Royal College of
Occupational Therapists, London, UK.
Email: bjoteditorial@rcot.co.uk
156
strategy to grow and improve BJOT as a destination for the
highest quality research in occupational therapy.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the
research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.
Contributorship
AJ and RL wrote and edited the manuscript.
British Journal of Occupational Therapy 85(3)
Patient and public involvement data
During the development, progress, and reporting of the submitted re-
search, Patient and Public Involvement in the research was: Not included
at any stage of the research.
References
Lambert (2020) Strategy for BJOT development. British Journal of
Occupational Therapy 83(8): 485–487.
Unsworth (2020) Writing systematic, scoping, and app reviews:
summarising and appraising best evidence. British Journal of
Occupational Therapy. 83(5): 277–284.