The inaugural year of publication for JAMA Network Open has been an unqualified success. Our mission is to be “an international, peer-reviewed, open access, general medical journal that publishes research on clinical care, innovation in health care, health policy, and global health across all health disciplines and countries for clinicians, investigators, and policy makers.” We believe that the journal is clearly well on its way to fulfilling this mission. We are grateful that JAMA Network Open has been embraced by the international community who choose to submit to the journal and who read our content each week.
We thank the authors who have entrusted us to consider their work. As shown in the Table,2-5 we have received 1596 research manuscripts in the first year and published 249, for an acceptance rate of 26%. We have also published 100 Invited Commentaries and Editorials that help to put these new research findings into context for the reader, whether they be clinicians, investigators, policy makers, or the general public. We are delighted that 43% of our submissions are from countries outside the United States, reflecting our commitment and mission to being an international journal. We are committed to making this process as smooth and expeditious as possible for authors, as reflected in the time in which decisions are made and articles are published once accepted.
The reach of our journal has been impressive. There have been more than 2 million full-text or PDF downloads of articles this past year, doubly impressive since the first publication was only on May 18, 2018. Our articles have been cited in the media more than 11 000 times since May. In addition, the journal has been accepted into MEDLINE and the Emerging Sources Citation Index, and all research articles are deposited to PubMed Central.
JAMA Network Open has been a leader in innovation and will continue to be so. The JAMA Network pioneered the use of a 2-column format for viewing articles online that makes reading articles online easy and enjoyable. The site is designed to be used on all devices and sizes itself automatically for the screen size of the device. We are one of the first journals to be on Apple News, making our content increasingly available to the public. This year, we will be the first journal to have Key Points of all articles translated into Spanish and Chinese languages. We are now recording podcasts in which we discuss important articles appearing in the journal. We have visual abstracts, which make the information contained in an article much more accessible to all.
Many people have been responsible for making this journal happen. Our editorial staff have worked tirelessly to ensure that every Friday JAMA Network Open appears online with superbly edited content. Colleen Kelly has worked behind the scenes in managing the startup of the journal and has been key in keeping the process on track. Dan Lowden, Shannon Sparenga, Heather Green, and Michaela Mark perform the day-to-day processing of submissions, reviews, and author correspondence and are responsible for how smoothly the process is for all of us. Our outstanding editorial board has provided guidance and advice on how to make JAMA Network Open not just the best open access journal in the world, but one of the best journals publishing health-related research.
Our associate editors, digital editor, and statistical editor have been truly an outstanding team. Our discussions of manuscripts each week are a lively intellectual interchange as we carefully consider each manuscript and the reviewers’ comments in our decisions on what we should publish. These thoughtful discussions are peer learning and teaching at its best. As one of our associate editors said, it is one of the few conference calls he actually looks forward to!
We believe that the unsung heroes of journals are the peer reviewers.1 As members of the community of science, peer reviewers contribute their time and energy to the publishing process, which is totally dependent on them in our efforts to publish the highest-quality science that we can. The expertise of these reviewers is critical to us in fulfilling our mission of publishing studies that will make a difference in the health and health care of people around the world. Every study we publish has also been reviewed by one of our core group of statistical consultants who have helped authors conduct the best and most rigorous analyses of their data.
Our greatest expression of gratitude, however, is due to Howard Bauchner, MD, MPH, editor in chief of JAMA and the JAMA Network, Tom Easley, publisher of the JAMA Network, and Annette Flanagin, RN, MA, executive managing editor of JAMA and the JAMA Network. They had a vision for an open access journal that would uphold the same high standards as the other journals in the JAMA Network and the unflagging commitment to make that vision a reality. Without their tireless support, this enterprise would not have achieved the success it has.
Published: February 22, 2019. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2019.0326
Open Access: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the CC-BY License. © 2019 Rivara FP et al. JAMA Network Open.
Corresponding Author: Frederick P. Rivara, MD, MPH, Department of Pediatrics, University of Washington, Box 359960, 325 Ninth Ave, Seattle, WA 98104 (fpr@uw.edu).
Conflict of Interest Disclosures: None reported.