As I am sure most readers will know by now, the International Journal of Qualitative Studies on Health and Well-being (IJQHW) became an Open Access journal at the beginning of 2010. The transition also involved a change of publisher, from Informa Healthcare to Co-Action Publishing. All back volumes (2006–2009) were at the same time made accessible via the “Archive” on the journal's new website www.ijqhw.net, giving readers and researchers free access to all content published in the journal from the start.
The very first issue of the IJQHW was published in 2006 – we are currently publishing volume six. Extensive lobbying efforts led by Karin Dahlberg and myself finally, despite many setbacks, resulted in a coveted contract with Taylor & Frances (later Informa Healthcare). Karin and I had a vision about an international scientific journal that could support, improve and govern qualitative research by offering a platform for high standard qualitative research on health and well-being. The mission has since then remained focused on extending the knowledge of health and well-being and improving health and health care based on that understanding.
Then, in January 2010, after four years with a subscription-based “paper journal”, we moved to Co-Action Publishing, a relatively new Open Access publisher based in Scandinavia. The electronic manuscript submission and handling system that was introduced by our new publisher has proved to speed up the entire publication process, and the fact that papers are published online immediately after they have been accepted and typeset has shortened the time from submission to publication even further. The papers can now be freely accessed and downloaded immediately after they have been mounted on the journal's website which has resulted in a huge readership.
In 2010, the IJQHW published 25 Empirical studies, three Philosophical/theoretical papers, four Editorials, one Letter to the Editor, and one Book review – 300 pages in all. A total of 50% of the submitted papers were rejected. The average time from acceptance to online publication was 21 working days. Naturally, the length of the peer review process varied.
A big and, over the year, increasing number of visitors to the journal's website was seen in 2010; in fact we had more than 15,000 visits from some 11,000 unique visitors in 141 countries. Most visits came from Sweden (24%), followed by US (15%), UK (10%), Canada (9%), Norway (6%), India (3.9%), Australia (3.8%), Denmark (3.2%), Japan (1.6%), and Iran (1.4%).
Even more impressive was the number of full-text downloads, which gained momentum over the year and reached a total of 55,634 by the end of December (Table I). Of these, 8,469 were accessed via PubMed Central, the free digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) developed and managed by NIH's National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) in the National Library of Medicine (NLM). In June, 2010, the IJQHW was accepted for inclusion in this prestigious archive after due evaluation.
Table I.
Number of full-text downloads during 2010 via the Journal's website and PubMed Central, respectively.
| Jan | Feb | Mars | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec | TOTAL | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| IJQHW 2010 | 290 | 2776 | 4577 | 4437 | 3852 | 3785 | 3375 | 4020 | 4302 | 4836 | 5097 | 5818 | 47165 |
| PubMed Central 2010 | – | – | – | – | – | 640 | 1137 | 1185 | 1486 | 2232 | 187 | 1602 | 8469 |
By the end of the year, the IJQHW was included in/covered by/tracked by:
Abstracts in Social Gerontology, Academic Search Complete, Applied Social Sciences Indexing and Abstracting (ASSIA), CINAHL, CINAHL Plus, Citation Index/Social Scisearch, Current Abstracts, Current Contents/Social and Behavioural Sciences, DOAJ, Intute-Education and research methods, Journal Citation Reports/Social Sciences Edition, ProQuest Summon, PsycFIRST, PsycINFO, Scopus (2007-), PubMed, PubMed Central, Social Sciences Citation Index, TOC Premier (Table of Contents).
Material in the journal was also further distributed by EBSCO, one of the world's largest content aggregators and research database providers.
We are expecting the journal's first Impact Factor before the summer and we will of course announce it on the journal's website immediately thereafter.
The IJQHW enjoyed a small stipend from Halmstad University to support publication in 2010, and has received financial support from the Swedish Research Council for 2011. However, from 2012 publication of an article in the journal will incur a relatively small publication fee to cover the costs of running the journal (€600 for up to 10 typeset pages). For a list of universities and funders already reimbursing its researchers for such a fee, please see http://www.ijqhw.net/public/site/pages/Funders.php.
Karin Dahlberg recently left her position as one of the Co-editors of the IJQHW. Over the years, she has done an outstanding job and in a committed way participated in shaping the journal into a respected international journal. Over the years, Karin and I have had many informal discussions about research in general and qualitative research in particular, which has also contributed to the development of the journal. I will miss Karin very much in the daily work with submissions and policy issues, but of course I have full respect for her decision to step down from the exciting but demanding task of handling a more and more time consuming scientific journal. Karin will be hard to replace, but we are now looking for a new Co-editor.
I am pleased to inform you that the journal's other Co-editor, Peter Ashworth, UK, will continue to support me in my daily work. Peter joined us in 2010 and his deep knowledge and commitment have contributed immensely to enhancing the compe- tence of the editors' group and to consolidating the reputation of the journal.
We are also in the process of reviewing and reinvigorating the Editorial board. Here it is of importance to have a broad range of researchers covering the IJQHW's entire scope and representing the journal in various parts of the world. The new Co-editor and Editorial board members will feature on the journal's website before the summer. The goal of the entire editorial team – I myself, the Co-editors and the Editorial board – will be to develop the IJQHW into an even better source of information in the area of health and well-being so that it will become a first-option journal for authors as well as for readers interested in this important aspect of medical research.