Diagnostic pathology in 2012: development of digital pathology in an open access journal

http://www.diagnosticpathology.diagnomx.eu/vs/1944221953867351 webciteThe digital world, which is the digitalization of all kinds of data, forms the basics of communication. Communication is one of the main components in medical treatment and research. How does this condition reflect to scientific publication, especially to open access peer reviewed pathology journals?Digitalization in surgical diagnostic pathology mainly involves partly and completely digitized images of microscopic slides (still images, virtual slides), the diagnostic work with these slides (virtual microscopy), measurements and derived clinical applications, as well as integration into Hospital Information System (HIS) and Laboratory Information Systems (LIS). Virtual Slides (VS) are quite large (about 3 GB) and demand a specific server. Our journal Diagnostic Pathology is the only one that integrates virtual slides in its articles to our knowledge.Peer reviewed open access journals are in some part equivalent, in other parts contrary to conventional peer reviewed scientific journals: Equivalent in terms of financial interest of the publisher, format of data/script presentation and reading, contrivers in the financial model. Authors who usually use grants have to pay, readers have free and unlimited access; articles are presented in conventional order such as summary, introduction, material and methods, etc. Additional features of the digitized environment such as “interactive publication” (similar to on-line scientific chat), performance of image analysis (readers might use open access available measurement systems such as EAMUSTM (http://www.diagnomx.eu:8080/amp webcite), or access to open structured atlases are not available at present to our knowledge.This Editorial written at the end of 2012 tries to present a survey of the journal’s development in 2012.The journal Diagnostic Pathology started in 2006, and published 46 articles in that year. In 2011, the number of submitted articles accounte