MRM Letter from the Editor: February 2025

February 20, 2025

Dear Magnetic Resonance in Medicine Subscribers,

The February issue of Magn Reson Med starts with an Editorial on the progress of the Code Review initiative. This is a scheme whereby members of the ISMRM Reproducible Research Study Group (RRSG) offer to arrange a review of code that is attached to a manuscript’s Data Availability Statement. They review the code for ease of download, ability to run, and quality of documentation. They do not check the code for scientific accuracy or computational efficiency, and the scientific reviewers of the paper are not made aware that a Code Review has been requested. As the Editorial shows, issues (both minor and major) were picked up in about two thirds of the Code Reviews performed (usually missing files, or hard-wired links, or installation issues), most of which were rectified by the authors after the Code Review and before publication of the paper. This seems to indicate the high value of the Code Review, and the much greater impact that the authors’ papers will likely have in the scientific community by providing working and easy-to-use code. Hopefully this Editorial will encourage more authors (and even other journals) to adopt this approach. Soon the RRSG will put out a call for more Code Reviewers, so look out for that if you are interested (I will also provide a link to their form when they issue the call).

Next, and as signalled last month, I want to remind authors that at some point in 2025 Wiley will move Magn Reson Med to its own manuscript management platform, known as Research Exchange (ReX) – currently the journal uses Manuscript Central. This shift will start with the author submission step, which will probably commence sometime in the Spring of 2025. The MRM Editorial Office is working hard to minimize any disruptions that might occur as this transition is made, but I wanted to alert you that it is likely to happen sometime in the coming months. We will try to give a further alert when it does. Subsequently (currently targeted in the summer of 2025) the review process will also transfer to ReX, such that over time all Wiley journals will use this platform. Again, we will try to keep you posted as the new system is rolled out.

For now authors will still use Manuscript Central (https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/mrm) and we continue to ask you to ensure that traffic coming from manuscriptcentral.com (usually via amazonses.com) is not blocked by your email server.

Best wishes,
Peter Jezzard, PhD

HEADLINES

Don’t forget to keep checking Study Group Virtual Special Issues that can be found at the journal homepage. Most ISMRM Study Groups have created Virtual Special Issues, with the aim of summarising the latest research in these topic areas. The idea is to update these at least annually to ensure that they remain “living documents” and hopefully will be a valuable resource to Study Group members.
In partnership with the Reproducible Research Study Group (RRSG) we are now offering authors the option of a Code Review of any code they provide in a Data Availability Statement. If authors request it, the RRSG will download the code and check that it installs and can be run. For details see here and an editorial on the experiences of the first year of its use here.

FEBRUARY ISSUE

Attached you will find, in PDF format, the Magnetic Resonance in Medicine Table of Contents (TOC) for the Volume 93, Number 2, February 2025 issue. Additionally, clicking on a title in the attached PDF will take you directly to its abstract. To view the entire article, please use either your log-in information for the Wiley website or your institutional access. Note that many papers in Magnetic Resonance in Medicine are published as Open Access articles and can be freely downloaded by anyone.

February’s Cover Art: This month’s cover art is from:

RF coil design strategies for improving SNR at the ultrahigh magnetic field of 10.5T, by Matt Waks, Russell L. Lagore, Edward Auerbach, Andrea Grant, Alireza Sadeghi-Tarakameh, Lance DelaBarre, Steve Jungst, Nader Tavaf, Riccardo Lattanzi, Ilias Giannakopoulos, Steen Moeller, Xiaoping Wu, Essa Yacoub, Luca Vizioli, Simon Schmidt, Gregory J. Metzger, Yigitcan Eryaman, Gregor Adriany, Kamil Uğurbil

February’s Editor’s Picks: Each month, we highlight articles from the current issue that might be of particular interest to our readers. The articles will be available online to anyone for a period of two years, regardless of their subscription status. This month’s selections are: