Reviews in Health Care 2012; 3(1): 3-4

Editorial

Are you taking full advantage of Reviews in Health Care?

Silvia Maina 1

1 Editor, SEEd Medical Publishers

When Reviews in Health Care was launched, the editorial board agreed on many guiding objectives: to publish a peer-reviewed, credible, and international journal, to produce high quality scientific articles, to create a link among different medical disciplines, and to promote the discussion about health care.

One year after its launch, we can say that we are moving towards these goals. RHC is indexed in many databases, increasing consistently its visibility. It now reaches readers throughout the world, and our readership is still significantly growing. The journal is more and more attracting high quality submissions, and the number of international authors involved is rising.

All these facts are of course of great importance for the journal itself: the “publish or perish” principle can be applied to journals, as well as to authors, and the main goal of a journal is to publish articles that people actually read.

Analysing data collected in RHC first year of life, we wondered if readers and authors are satisfied of our efforts, and especially if they are fully aware of the possibilities that this journal offers them.

For example, let’s consider the RHC open access model. As everybody knows, open access implies downloading and reading full papers for free. Besides, for authors, the main advantages to publish in an open access journal are increased visibility and higher citation rate of their articles. But open access also means that authors keep selected key rights to their articles. In particular, RHC articles are published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial License which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes. This means that, if you are an author of an article published in RHC, you can distribute copies in the course of teaching and research, or post the article on your personal or institutional website.

A second example is the possibility of debate. Let’s take as example Godman’s review on prescribing restrictions, published in the current issue. The topic is relevant, and many questions may arise reading this article. For example, do you agree with financial incentive for practitioners as a measure to enhance prescribing efficiency? Do you think that prescribing restrictions can affect quality of care? Which are the current plans in your country?

If publishing means to stimulate debate, this can be a good occasion to start talking. On RHC website, by clicking on the “Add comment” button, placed at the end of the html version of each article, you can post your comments or ask authors direct questions.

We feel that it is now time for the community represented by the readership of this journal to cooperate. Are articles published of your interest? Are there any topics you would like to see covered by our journal? It is important that we hear from you, and we encourage any feedback: via article comment, or e-mail (s.maina@edizioniseed.it), or Twitter (@SEEdPublisher).

This journal is your journal: help us to make it better serve your needs by sending your comments and articles.