Year: 2018
Type: article
Abstract: Welcome to JAMIA Open, AMIA’s Gold Open Access journal. This inaugural issue is the culmination of more than a decade of discussions and planning by AMIA to expand the publication venue offerings for showcasing the best informatics research and applications that span the breadth of biomedicine and health. It is truly a privilege and an honor to serve as JAMIA Open’s first Editor-in-Chief, and I am fortunate to be joined by a team of Associate Editors who bring the necessary experience and expertise to shape the path for this new journal. I am also especially proud that JAMIA Open is supported by an Editorial Board that reflects the diversity of the biomedical informatics community. When JAMIA began in 1994, it addressed an essential need for a formal publication that complemented AMIA’s conference proceedings. Through the years, JAMIA has retained its high regard in the international biomedical and health informatics community, as well as serving as the flagship journal for the informatics community in the United States. An unintended consequence of this success has challenged the traditional publication model, resulting in high-quality studies being denied publication with few alternatives. The landscape of publishing has similarly evolved in the last decade, where the concept of an “article” and its associated artifacts has deviated from that of a static publication with static supplementary material. JAMIA Open was conceptualized to serve as an essential complement to JAMIA. JAMIA Open is especially well suited for those contributions that include active content or on topics that may not be within the scope of interest for JAMIA (but still meet appropriate standards for rigor and reproducibility as assessed by peer-review). To prevent overlapping scope, there is regular communication between the JAMIA and JAMIA Open Editors and AMIA leadership. JAMIA Open also introduces new manuscript types for the AMIA community, including: Application Notes, Database Notes, Algorithm Briefs, and Implementation Briefs. These new manuscript types may also include “live” content (eg using embedded code as in a Jupyter Notebook). In alignment with how AMIA organizes its membership into major sub-disciplines, JAMIA Open is primarily organized around the 5 major thematic areas: (1) Translational Bioinformatics; (2) Clinical Research Informatics; (3) Clinical Informatics; (4) Consumer Health Informatics; and (5) Public Health Informatics. Additional topic areas that are orthogonal to informatics, such as data science and implementation science, will be explicitly used to guide the overall scope of the journal as relevant to the major thematic areas. A driving factor in selection of manuscripts for publication is based on the soundness of methodology and reproducibility of results. As appropriate, manuscripts can be complemented with digital content and code repositories through the use of contemporary frameworks for data and code sharing. For example, frameworks and tools may be shared through archived Docker containers, digital data archived and indexed within Dryad, and source code shared through a repository like GitHub or Bitbucket. Each of these research artifacts are indexed with digital object identifiers and associated with minimum standards for metadata to promote findability. Of course, the success of a journal is not measured based on its vision, but its content. The volume of direct submissions received since December 2017 have exceeded all expectations and have sent a clear message that JAMIA Open is addressing a community need. We are also working with JAMIA to identify manuscripts that may be considered by JAMIA Open, and it is anticipated that more authors will consider this option before leaving the AMIA family of journals. We have striven for, and have achieved, more than 95% of manuscripts receiving their first decision within a month of submission. All JAMIA Open articles are accompanied by patient/community facing abstracts that highlight key findings. These summaries provide an opportunity for authors to directly share their perspective on the broader impacts of their contribution. This feature not only reminds us about the primary motivation of our work (patients and communities), but also forms the basis for increased dialog with the beneficiaries of our advances in leveraging informatics to improve health and health care. I hope that you enjoy this first issue of JAMIA Open, and furthermore hope that you find it to encourage you to submit your finest work for consideration.
Source: JAMIA Open
Author: Indra Neil Sarkar
Institution: Brown University
Language: English
Subfield: History and Philosophy of Science
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $3,762
OpenAlex ID: W2795773284