Convenient JAMIA Online Features

The JAMIA online publication site, www.jamia.org, is hosted by HighWire Press, which is a not-for-profit (and also, as HighWire states, not-for-loss) subsidiary of Stanford University. Recently, JAMIA and HighWire added a number of useful and interesting features for visitors to the JAMIA Web site, www.jamia.org. We describe these changes herein. To take advantage of these features, we remind subscribers to “activate” their JAMIA subscriptions on HighWire if they have not yet done so. Activation of a JAMIA subscription can be done by going to the JAMIA homepage and “clicking” on the “Subscriptions” link on the left-hand side of the homepage. The user will then be asked for their 10-digit “Customer Number.” For those who purchased an individual membership, the “Customer Number” was included with the payment confirmation letter. For AMIA members, the AMIA member number received will serve as the “Customer Number”; if the member number is less than 10-digits add an appropriate number of zeros to the beginning of the number.

The most visible changes comprise new links added to the homepage. Under the “Articles in Demand” header, one finds links to the “50 most read” and “50 most cited” JAMIA articles. The “most read” ranking is based on the number of accesses via HighWire to full-text views and PDF views of JAMIA articles. The “most cited” ranking counts citations to articles on the JAMIA site from articles posted on other HighWire-hosted journals. ¹ The link to the “Free Sample Issue” provides individuals, even those without a JAMIA subscription, with unrestricted access to one complete issue of JAMIA. The free sample issue is selected by the JAMIA Editorial Office and will be updated periodically to remain current.

Other features added to the JAMIA homepage include the “Browse by Section” and “Free Articles” links. The former function enables individuals to search through published articles according to the JAMIA sections in which they were published, typically one of: Perspectives on Informatics, The Practice of Informatics, or Original Investigations. At various times, JAMIA issues may include other sections, such as “Focus on …”, “Editorial Comments”, “Letters to the Editor”, and “Special Features”. The Perspectives on Informatics section contains articles that carry “opinions of individuals and organizations regarding important topics in the field” along with “papers of other types that provide general insights regarding Biomedical Informatics.” ¹ The most common types of papers found in this section are Viewpoint papers and White papers. Papers in The Practice of Informatics section “further the development of medical informatics as a field.” ¹ The most common types of articles that appear in this section are Application of Information Technology papers, Technical Brief papers, Technology Evaluation papers, Review papers, and Implementation Brief papers. The The Original Investigations section presents papers with “original hypotheses and findings,” which most commonly include Research papers, Model Formulation papers, and Case Report papers. The “Focus on” section is comprised of a collection of articles that share a common theme and are grouped together in order to highlight their subject matter. Any type of article (i.e., Research paper, Viewpoint, Case Report, etc.) may appear in this section as long as the subject matter is relevant to the focus. The “Special Features” section generally contains articles related to important AMIA or ACMI events, such as brief biographical descriptions for recently inducted ACMI Fellows and International Associates, and a more detailed biography of the most recent recipient of the Morris F. Collen Award. The “Editorial Comments” section and the “Letters to the Editor” section contain responses to published articles.

Over the past several years, some online JAMIA articles have been designated “free for view”–meaning that anyone, even non-subscribers, can view the entire article at www.jamia.org free of charge. Beginning with Volume 15, Issue 3, the JAMIA Editorial Office has selected (with authors' consent) five or six free articles per JAMIA issue. In order to highlight current and past free articles, the “Free Articles” link was recently added. The free articles page provides a running list, divided by volume and issue, of such articles. In addition to the free articles page, JAMIA (through a recent vote of the AMIA Board of Directors) also changed its policy regarding content accessibility via PubMed Central (PMC). While all JAMIA content since Vol 1 Issue 1 in 1994 has been indexed in MEDLINE and delivered to PMC, the change in policy decreased the “embargo” period (the time after print publication until “free access” via PubMed Central) from 12 months to 6 months. Also, because people viewing JAMIA articles from PubMed Central or from Elsevier's Science Direct did not always have free access to JAMIA content on HighWire, all JAMIA data supplements at HighWire have been designated free for view (even if the parent article of the data supplement is not free for view).

Two final additions to the JAMIA homepage are “cover highlights” and the availability of an RSS feed. Per issue, the Editorial staff will designate 4–5 articles of potentially high interest to JAMIA readers to appear in a section on the homepage titled “In This Issue.” The acronym RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication.” It provides a mechanism to subscribe to “headlines” from a website. ² The JAMIA RSS feed can give subscribers access to the publish ahead of print (PrePrint) articles as soon as they are posted. We note that other, previously existing features can help online JAMIA readers to “keep current” with JAMIA content. Two such features are eTOCs and CiteTrack. The eTOCs feature provides an alternative to RSS that allows individuals to register their email address so that they can receive “complete Tables of Contents (from both current and future content) or notification that an issue has just gone online.” ² The URL address to sign up for this feature is http://www.jamia.org/cgi/alerts/etoc. The eTOC sign up page can also be accessed by going to the JAMIA homepage, www.jamia.org, and “clicking” on the “Customized Alerts” link on the left-hand side of the homepage. Persons wishing to sign up must provide their JAMIA user name and password or a valid email address. The CiteTrack feature is user-customizable. Individuals can designate for which HighWire journals they would like alerts and specify the criteria that merit an alert, such as the inclusion of certain keywords, articles on a certain topic, or articles written by certain authors. CiteTrack can also notify the user when an article of interest is cited by another article or when a correction is posted for an article. ²

A number of enhancements appear as options available while reading a JAMIA article online. The Google Scholar feature, available when viewing a specific JAMIA article, allows one to review a list of known-to-Google articles by a specified author of the JAMIA article. The list is sorted by Google Scholar citation rank (most cited articles first), but can alternatively be sorted by most recent article first. Also available while viewing a specific JAMIA article content is a PubMed link that shows all articles found in the MEDLINE database authored by the specified JAMIA author. Another option in the PubMed section links the user to the PubMed citation page for the current JAMIA article. From there, one can utilize PubMed functions such as “Related articles” to find additional items of interest. There is also a more direct way to view the PubMed related articles list from within a JAMIA article – the “similar articles in PubMed” link. Finally, the “similar articles in this journal” link generates a list of JAMIA articles that are similar in subject matter to the article currently being viewed.

Important Considerations Related to JAMIA Information to Authors

There are a number of JAMIA policy issues that at times confuse potential authors during the manuscript preparation and submission process. The most common is JAMIA's policy regarding prior or duplicative publication, which is similar to many biomedical journals with high impact factors. The JAMIA policy is stated in the instructions to authors on JAMIA's Web site, is recapitulated in a certification of originality form that authors must sign as part of submitting an article to JAMIA, and was further described in detail in a JAMIA Editorial (“On Exemplary Scientific Conduct Regarding Submission of Manuscripts to Biomedical Informatics Journals” in the January 2006 issue, available at http://www.jamia.org/cgi/content/full/13/1/113). ³

Some individuals fail to understand that JAMIA considers prior publication to include any Web-based posting of a manuscript (or any portions of the manuscript longer than 400 words). This also applies to prior Web posting of “preliminary drafts” with substantially similar content, such as laboratory technical reports, or to a university's publication of Masters or PhD Theses on the Internet, as well as to a course instructors' posting of pre-publication article texts for students. Any such posting of materials with wide open (full Internet) visibility disqualifies a manuscript containing those materials (verbatim or in spirit) for consideration by JAMIA because in JAMIA's opinion, the material has already been published and is no longer “newsworthy”, even though it may describe important results and insights. Second, JAMIA considers publication of an abstract or poster of greater than 400 words in length that is the basis for a subsequent JAMIA manuscript to constitute prior publication. This is especially important for individuals who present materials at scientific meetings or conferences that publish the posters and abstracts in print or electronic format for general distribution via a journal, a MEDLINE-indexed conference proceeding, or via the Web. Without the addition of substantially new methods, results, and/or insights, JAMIA will not consider such submissions for publication.

There are several exceptions to the foregoing general rules about prior publication. First, if a pre-publication manuscript was posted on a password-restricted intranet, viewable, for example, only by individuals at the parent department or institution of the authors, then no prior “general publication” occurs by this mechanism. Second, if authors working for the government of a state or country are required by the nature of their employment (or if researchers under government contract are similarly required) to publish their work on a government-sponsored Web site, JAMIA will allow a “summary” version of the work to be considered for publication because the authors were legally obligated by the nature of their employment to publish their work on the Web. Of note, in a related but not identical situation, many universities that electronically publish students' Masters and Doctoral thesis dissertations allow the students to designate their thesis for publication in a restricted “intranet only” manner, or alternatively, for full Internet access. The former would not prevent subsequent JAMIA publication of related thesis content, while the latter “open Internet” publication would preclude JAMIA consideration for publication.

These JAMIA policies are similar to those of many other biomedical journals. If potential authors have questions, they should review the above-mentioned published JAMIA guidelines, ³ and if necessary, can contact the JAMIA Editorial Assistant, Alexis Broussard, at the following email address: jamia@vanderbilt.edu to discuss individual cases not covered in the above discussion. We hope that readers will find these new features on online JAMIA to be useful and straightforward. Additional suggestions are welcome.