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In living color

As primates, we humans see the world through trichromatic filters: three sets of cones, which reproduce the entire array of colors in the visible spectrum. As highly visual animals, we use color to distinguish many items in the natural environment; as scientists, we use color to differentiate different components of brains, cells, and individual molecules. Thus, it is natural for a publication such as The Journal of Comparative Neurology to utilize color extensively in our work. Against this tendency has been the cost of color reproduction. For many years, the cost of color printing was nearly prohibitive. It still costs more than $500 per page for a journal that uses occasional color to reproduce a few color pages per issue. However, recent trends both in science and in the printing industry have, fortunately, been pushing down the costs of color reproduction. Nearly all laboratories now capture color images with digital cameras. The only cost of using color, rather than black and white reproduction of images is that the files are three times as bulky (representing the necessity for using three color channels to reproduce the full spectrum of visible colors). As the cost of electronic memory space has dropped, the cost of reproducing color in the online version of a journal has therefore become negligible. As a result, authors have wanted to use color more extensively in their work than ever before over the last few years. As a response to this trend, a few years ago JCN reduced the cost of a color page from about $500 to $350 dollars per page, to bring this medium within the budget of more laboratories. The only restriction on this color usage, put in place by the publisher who was subsidizing each color page, was that it had to be scientifically necessary, not just an aesthetic enhancement. The response has been gratifying, as the number of color pages per issue has increased gradually from three or four in the years prior to this policy, to about 50 color pages per issue currently. And, a surprising thing has happened as we have used more color pages: the cost of color per page has dropped, because the more color pages are printed in a periodical per issue, the less the cost per page. In response to these changed circumstances, our publisher, John Wiley and Sons, has agreed to reduce the color page charge to $250 per page, effective with January 1, 2007 issue. They have also lifted the restriction that color be scientifically necessary. Thus, at this point the authors in JCN are free to use color to the extent that their vision, and their budgets, allow. Our goal is to reduce the cost of color to the minimum possible. If the new policy allows authors to use more color pages, we expect the cost per page to drop further, and we hope to be able to pass that saving on to our authors. At some point, we hope to achieve the next stage in our evolution, when it becomes cost neutral to move to printing in full color (i.e., color available on every page). As we evolve toward a full-color journal, we are also instituting a new policy which we hope will widen access among those readers who have impaired color vision. About 6-10% of males have red-green color impairment. These individuals have at least four different distinct genetic deficits that affect color vision, but they all have great difficulty distinguishing images presented in redgreen color pairs. Unfortunately, the most commonly used fluorophores in fluorescence microscopy employ the red and green color combination. These readers are not able to distinguish the colors accurately in the commonly used red-green color images that make up a large percentage of all of the color pages published in JCN. Some of our authors may notice that several of our editors over the last few years have independently begun asking their authors to convert red-green images to magenta-green. Ian Meinertzhagen, our editor for invertebrate neurobiology, has led this reform, and as a result nearly all papers on invertebrates published in JCN over the last few years have used this convention. Our experience is that this is a very easy switch to make, and it does not impair the images in any way (magenta is a purple-red color, and the overlap of magenta and green is white, which is clearly visible both to those with normal color vision and those with red-green color blindness). As a result, the editors of JCN have decided to institute a formal policy, also effective with papers that are accepted after January 1, 2007, asking all authors to convert red-green images to magentagreen before they are submitted to JCN (as a service to our reviewers, many of whom also are red-green color blind). (Note that for images using other color combinations, the situation is not so simple, and we do not require that this be done, although authors may want to experiment with the method below, as it may make the images more accessible.)