Social media and web presence are important for our journal, authors, readers and the spinal cord injury community. They help ensure that our papers are widely read: a major goal for all researchers and any journal. A widely read paper is more likely to change clinical practice, be well cited and encourage further research in the area. We all need to use any possible strategies to constantly increase our readership even if this means dragging some kicking and screaming into the realm of social media.

Spinal Cord has taken the plunge and embraced social media. We now have very active Twitter, Facebook and Instagram feeds and pages managed by one of our Associate Editors (Dr Sonja de Groot). These mediums are used to push out messages about your papers, all things related to the journal, spinal cord injury and publication. We encourage all of you to sign up and stay in touch with news from the journal (see below for links).

Authors can also play their part in increasing the number of readers of their papers. Now, unlike the past, authors are given permission by our Publishers to freely share their papers on any social media platform or website. To facilitate this process authors are provided with a unique URL to their papers when they are published. They can post these URLs anywhere giving anyone access to read (but not download) their papers without having to pay a subscription fee (provided this is not done for commercial purposes). This initiative is called SharedIt, and has been widely acclaimed as a game changer for the publication world and push to open access (http://www.springernature.com/gp/researchers/sharedit). We encourage authors to take full advantage of this service. Post the URLs of your papers on your institutions’ webpages, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and ResearchGate feeds, or any other social media platform.

Spinal Cord also attracts readers to your papers by providing all with free access to any of its publications after one year. Papers are behind a pay wall initially but then free for all to read and download from the journal website. This is not widely known but should be an important consideration for potential authors. Most competing journals do not provide free access after such a short time and a lot of journals never open their papers to non-paying readers. Of course authors can also opt to provide open access to their papers from the day of publication if they are willing to cover the publication fee.

All our papers are now accompanied by an Altmetric score which can be found at the top of any paper on our journal website. This score indicates the amount of online attention a paper receives by gathering data on things such as the number of tweets and mentions on web feeds. Scores like this are being increasingly used instead of the more traditional Impact Factor to judge journals and their papers.

We hope that this editorial has increased readers and potential authors awareness of our multi-pronged approach to increasing our social media and web presence. We also wanted to reassure all that Spinal Cord takes its social media and web presence very seriously. We encourage all of our authors and readers who are committed to helping advance Spinal Cord to do the same.

Links to social media platforms for Spinal Cord

Twitter: @JournalSCI

Facebook: Spinal Cord journal

Instagram: spinalcordjournal