Abstract

Publication of the January 2007 issue marks the first anniversary of the formation of the Virtual Journal for Biomedical Optics. This journal, published monthly by the Optical Society of America, covers research exploring the interface of light and biomedicine. As a virtual journal, it collects biomedical optics content from conventional journals into a single source. The first year has included 884 articles covering a wide range of topics including diffuse optical tomography, optical coherence tomography, nonlinear microscopy, digital holography, image reconstruction, optical spectroscopies for biomedicine, probes and contrast agents, microfluidics, optical traps, vision and color, cancer, neuroscience, optical therapies, dermatology, biodefense, and tissue engineering.

One of the novel aspects of this journal is the flexible links for the table of contents. Because of the inherently multidisciplinary aspect of biomedical optics, the content is not readily associated with a single topic heading. For example, most papers may be associated with either a technology or method such as fluorescence microscopy and image reconstruction, or an application area such as cancer detection or ophthalmology. The existence of multiple topics for each paper makes locating papers of interest more challenging for the reader. Fortunately, the flexibility of an online journal can help locate papers of interest. Initially each paper appears under only a single topic heading. If the reader is interested in seeing all of the papers related to a given topic, clicking a link next to the topic heading will cause all papers assigned with that topic to appear under the heading. Occasionally the initial table of contents will have a topic heading without any papers listed below the heading. This is because any papers corresponding to that listing have a primary assignment under another topic. We hope that the flexible table of contents is proving useful to the readers.

The VJBO began with content drawn from only OSA peer-reviewed journals, primarily Applied Optics , Optics Express, Optics Letters, and the Journal of the Optical Society of America A. Recently content from Applied Spectroscopy and the OSA monthly magazine Optics and Photonics News have been added. We intend to continue to expand the sources for the journal. Comments on ways to improve the journal are most welcome.

© 2007 Optical Society of America