One of the most challenging goals of any peer review journal is to publish its articles in as timely a manner as possible. Electronic submission and review systems have contributed greatly to the success of this goal, as have dedicated, committed editors and reviewers. But at some point, these systems reach their maximum rate of throughput, and there is little else to be done to speed up the process. However, there are opportunities that many journals have not taken advantage of, and the editorial and publishing staffs of the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology have decided to do so with our newest policy.

The Journal for some time now has published the complete articles by incorporating author corrections (corrected proofs) online in advance of print publication. To further accelerate the process, we will now begin to publish accepted manuscripts in advance of author corrections to make these articles available to our readers in a most timely manner. This means that all accepted manuscripts will be posted to the “Articles Online First” section of www.ajog.org shortly after acceptance. To avoid reader confusion, each accepted manuscript will be labeled as such. Subsequently, all stages of the article, from uncorrected proof to corrected proof, will be posted on the Journal website, labeled accordingly. With each new version, the previous version will be removed; when the article is assigned to an issue of American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology , it will be removed from the “Articles Online First” section altogether.

We offer this new reader service so that information that is important to the field will be available and disseminated more quickly than before. The editors and publishers continue to seek solutions to streamline the publication process to get these important articles to our readers and the benefits ultimately to our patients as quickly as possible. We welcome any suggestions and comments from our readers and authors.