2018 was a challenging year for us at Annals of Neurology, as the production company that produced the finished version of the Annals (Cenveo) filed for bankruptcy early in the year. At mid-year, our publisher, John Wiley and Sons, moved the production to a new company, SPi Global. (We were not the only Cenveo customer to do this; the US Census forms also were to have been produced by Cenveo, and the US Government Printing Office also chose another production company.) This changeover both slowed down the production of the last few issues (April through June) at Cenveo, and then the issues through the rest of 2018 at SPi Global, as they scrambled to catch up. Along the way, we encountered a second problem. Cenveo had for many years been giving us a monthly spreadsheet which accurately gave us the page count of the papers in our production queue. We used these to choose a set of papers each month to total 168 pages (our monthly page budget). In late 2017, we were assigned a Production Editor, who gave us estimates that in retrospect were consistently around 25% shorter than the actual pages. Thus, to make up (what we thought was) 168 pages in each issue was requiring around 25% more manuscripts than usual. It may seem difficult to believe that the Editors would not notice that, but manuscripts vary considerably in length, and so therefore does the number it takes to make up each issue. By the time an issue is put together, the Editors have read every paper in it, often more than once, and when the page proofs for the issue come back to us, we mainly check them for errors made in production. When the paper journal arrives, it goes right to the bookshelf, because we have read everything in it already. The last thing that would occur to us is to count the number of pages! The result was that our issues in late 2017 and early 2018 were averaging over 200 pages, but our backlog of papers ready to publish was exhausted, and we had to wait later each month to have sufficient papers to put together a new issue. We are indebted to Kathleen Gaffney, the eagle-eyed American Neurological Association publication consultant, who first pointed out the discrepancy between our page estimates and the actual number of published pages. My first impression was that this was impossible, because we thought we knew the number of pages in an issue before we sent it off to the production company. But with a quick glance at my bookshelf, my heart sank, as it was obvious from across the room that the issues from November 2017 through April 2018 were substantially plumper than usual. So while we were switching production staff, we also had to deal with recovering from having our issues for the first part of 2018 appear much later than we would ordinarily like. We typically try to have an issue ready online by the last week of the month preceding the cover date, and on the desks of our readers by the second week of the month. But over last summer, we were running more than a month behind schedule. We spent the second half of 2018 scrambling to get together enough papers to constitute each issue as close to its cover date as possible. By hustling the papers through the production process and publishing some issues that were shorter than usual, we have gradually worked our way back, and I am happy to report that we plan in early 2019 to have our issues back to appearing at our preferred schedule, and with a full number of pages per issue. Fortunately, our authors were not inconvenienced by any of this, as their papers appear in PubMed and in the Accepted Manuscripts section of our website within a few days of being accepted, and many of their papers were assigned to issues earlier than they otherwise would have been. We thank our readers and the American Neurological Association for their patience as we went through this process. We are indebted to Cathy Krendel, our publisher, for cracking the whip at the production company as needed, and the Production Editors at both Cenveo (Seth Ekman) and the new production company (Alverne Ball and Donna Tarman) who worked hard to get us back on track. And we have special kudos for Daniel Roe and Adam Gordon, our two Managing Editors, who played an especially important role in pulling us through the “troubles” this year. I also give my thanks to our Associate Editors, who helped to accelerate our review process this year, to keep up with the demand for manuscripts.

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2019 年

2018 年对我们神经病学年鉴来说是充满挑战的一年，因为制作年鉴 (Cenveo) 完成版的制作公司在年初申请破产。年中，我们的出版商 John Wiley and Sons 将制作转移到一家新公司 SPi Global。（我们不是唯一这样做的 Cenveo 客户；美国人口普查表也由 Cenveo 制作，美国政府印刷办公室也选择了另一家制作公司。）这种转变都减缓了最后几期的制作（4 月到 6 月）在 Cenveo，然后是 2018 年剩余时间在 SPi Global 的问题，因为他们争先恐后地赶上。一路上，我们遇到了第二个问题。Cenveo 多年来一直为我们提供每月电子表格，该电子表格准确地为我们提供了生产队列中论文的页数。我们每月使用这些来选择一组论文，总共 168 页（我们的每月页面预算）。2017 年底，我们被指派了一名制作编辑，他给了我们估计，回想起来一直比实际页面短 25% 左右。因此，要弥补（我们认为是）每期 168 页，需要比平时多 25% 的手稿。似乎很难相信编辑不会注意到这一点，但手稿的长度差异很大，因此组成每一期所需的数量也是如此。当一个问题被整理好时，编辑已经阅读了其中的每篇论文，通常不止一次，当问题的页面校样返回给我们时，我们主要检查它们是否存在生产中的错误。当纸质期刊到达时，它会直接进入书架，因为我们已经阅读了其中的所有内容。我们最后会想到的就是计算页数！结果是我们 2017 年底和 2018 年初的期刊平均超过 200 页，但我们准备发表的积压论文已经用完了，我们不得不每个月晚些时候等待足够的论文来组合新一期。我们要感谢目光敏锐的美国神经病学协会出版顾问 Kathleen Gaffney，她首先指出了我们估计的页面数量与实际发布的页面数量之间存在差异。我的第一印象是这是不可能的，因为我们认为我们在将问题发送给制作公司之前就知道它的页数。但是快速扫了一眼我的书架，我的心沉了下去，因为从房间的另一头可以明显看出，2017 年 11 月至 2018 年 4 月的问题比平时严重得多。因此，当我们更换生产人员时，我们还必须应对 2018 年上半年出现的问题比我们通常希望的要晚得多的问题。我们通常会尝试在封面日期前一个月的最后一周在网上准备好一期，并在该月的第二周之前在我们读者的办公桌上准备好。但在去年夏天，我们比计划晚了一个多月。我们在 2018 年下半年忙于收集足够的论文，以尽可能接近其封面日期来构成每一期。通过在制作过程中匆匆忙忙地发表论文并出版一些比平时更短的问题，我们逐渐回到了原点，我很高兴地报告，我们计划在 2019 年初让我们的问题重新出现在我们首选的时间表上，并且每期都有完整的页数。幸运的是，我们的作者并没有因此而感到不便，因为他们的论文在被接受后的几天内就会出现在 PubMed 和我们网站的“已接受手稿”部分，而且他们的许多论文被分配到比其他情况更早的问题到过。我们感谢我们的读者和美国神经病学协会在我们完成这个过程时的耐心。我们要感谢我们的出版商 Cathy Krendel，感谢他们在需要时对制作公司进行鞭策，感谢 Cenveo（Seth Ekman）和新制作公司（Alverne Ball 和 Donna Tarman）的制作编辑，他们为我们努力工作回到正轨。我们特别要感谢我们的两位总编辑 Daniel Roe 和 Adam Gordon，他们在帮助我们度过今年的“麻烦”方面发挥了特别重要的作用。我还要感谢我们的副主编，他们帮助我们加快了今年的审稿流程，以满足对稿件的需求。