Got a webcam?

Roger Watson, Editor-in-Chief

If the answer to the title of this entry is ‘yes’ and you have recently published a paper in JAN, then why not take the opportunity to promote your paper with a short You Tube video clip featuring yourself? The opportunities for promoting your work through social media, such as Twitter, Facebook and blogs are immense and YouTube is another medium. For example, see how one journal the International Journal of Clinical Practice has used YouTube on its home page.

There is nothing new about the use of these media and at JAN we have been using our Twitter page to great effect and others have been re-tweeting our entries and generating considerable interest in some papers.  For example, a recent article entitled: 'Can I get a retweet please? Health research recruitment and the Twittershpere' has, literally, been re-tweeted very effectively. At the time of writing, according to Altimetric, it has been tweeted 295 times from 259 accounts, to over 312,000 followers.

If you don't have a webcam or simply don’t like the idea of appearing in front of a camera, an alternative is the podcast where your voice is heard but you don’t have to be seen.  In case you are wondering if any respectable journals (other than JAN) are offering this facility, then look no further than The Lancet podcast page. These short presentations provide authors with the opportunity to convey their message less formally, to highlight the important points in their paper and to set their work in context. The Lancet podcasts are done with an interviewer; we can’t offer that facility, but we can point you to some guidelines for podcasts.

But back to videos (The Lancet is no stranger to YouTube either), we feel that these are an especially engaging way to convey your message and, while we will also be happy with podcasts, a video introduces more of a human factor. Our guidelines also cover making videos.

We try to lead by example at JAN and modesty does not prevent me from sharing a link with you to a short video I made recently in Australia. This was very professionally done, with an interviewer, proper lighting and excellent recording equipment. Don’t worry if you can’t reach these sorts of standards.

If you wish to take advantage of this opportunity the please contact the JAN office at jan@wiley.com.