The Importance of Open Access Journals in the Area of Public Health

Małgorzata Schlegel-Zawadzka* and Anna Prusak

The Importance of Open Access Journals in the Area of Public Health.

There are several, real-life examples illustrating the need for open access to knowledge on public health and medicine. According to Francis and Taylor survey (conducted around the world amongst over 14 thousand authors of 2011 via email), the major advantages of open access include: wider circulation (38% strongly agreed, 33% agreed), faster publication times (23% strongly agreed, 38% agreed) and higher visibility than publication in a subscription journal (27% strongly agreed, 28% agreed).

At present, there are over many open access journals available, but 10% of them are in the area of biology and medicine, which also includes public health. The new journal – Public Health – Open Journal by Openventio, aims to cover a variety of issues pertaining to public health systems around the world, such as risk, epidemics, education plans, monitoring and analyses, health programs, communication, outbreaks and subsequent containment. It will be available not only to scientists and academics, but also to practitioners – health professionals, students and even to patients and other lay people, whoever will be interested in latest= knowledge and reliable information on public health.

On the ISI Web of Knowledge (presently Thomson Reuters Web of Science) there are 23 journals with keyword ‟public health” in the title; among them, the highest 5-year Impact Factor is 7.365. The editors often recommend narrowing the research subject, linking in the titles public health with disaster medicine, environmental research, veterinary medicine, policy, dentistry, management and practice, ethics, nutrition, nursing, genomics, social work, tropical medicine. It reflects a broad spectrum of research aspects concerning public health problems. Some titles indicate focus on a selected region, e.g. “American”, “Asia-Pacific”, “Canadian”, “Central-European”, “Iranian”, “Scandinavian”, “Australian”, “New Zealand”.

Public Health Open J. 2016; 1(1): e2-e3. doi: 10.17140/PHOJ-1-e002

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