Staff Letter

Dear Authors,

We are so grateful to each of you for continuing to provide Operative Dentistry with such outstanding manuscripts to consider. We have seen a steady increase each year in the number of manuscripts that are sent to us for publication consideration. For example 20 years ago, during the 1992 volume year, we received 68 manuscripts for consideration, and printed 33 an acceptance rate of 48%; 10 years ago, during the 2002 volume year, we received 212 manuscripts—a 311% increase, 93 were printed putting our acceptance rate at 43%; last year we received 505—a 238% increase over 2002 and a 742% increase over 1992, 80 were printed (more pages than in 2002) for a 15% acceptance rate. As you can see, we are having to become more and more selective in the articles we publish, not only that, but because of the costs of maintaining a manuscript submission system that can deal with this kind of traffic, our costs are exponentially increasing as well. Unfortunately, it has come time that we need to pass a small portion of these costs on to our submitting authors. Operative Dentistry is charged by our submission vendor 25.00USD per manuscript that goes through our system, whether it is accepted for publication or not. Beginning with the first submission of 2013, that cost will now be charged to our authors to submit a manuscript into our system. This 25.00USD fee will be required for a manuscript to be considered in any way. Please understand that this fee is charged to us by our vendor, and will be non-refundable. Paying the submission fee will have no bearing on whether or not your manuscript will be accepted either for review, or for publication. We thank you for understanding the necessity of this step. Should you have any questions about this new policy, please contact our offices at editor@jopdent.org.

Sincerely,

Operative Dentistry Office Staff