Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR)

The Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR) began publishing in 1999 as a free, electronic, open access journal of cyber-medicine and electronic health (i.e., all aspects of the intersection of health and the Internet). The editor-in-chief and publisher since 2001 is Gunther Eysenbach, senior scientist, Centre for Global eHealth Information. JMIR is an international, interdisciplinary, scientific, peer-reviewed journal focused on research information and communication in the health care field using Internet-and intranet-related technologies. Fully indexed in seven services including MEDLINE, JMIR invites research papers from the medical sciences and from computer, behavioral, social, and communication sciences; psychology; library sciences; informatics; human-computer interaction studies; and related fields. JMIR is the official journal of both the Society for the Internet in Medicine (sponsors of the MedNet conference) and the Internet Healthcare Coalition.

JMIR's goal is to help health care and medical professionals and consumers maximize the use of the Internet to deliver quality health care and health information. To achieve this goal, JMIR publishes original research reporting the application, development, and evaluation of information technology related to the Internet, as well as proposals, reviews, and opinion papers on standards, policies, and legal and ethical issues of e-health. Some sample article titles from 2004 include:

• “Can Clinical Trials Requiring Frequent Participant Contact Be Conducted over the Internet?”

• “Pharmacist Computer Skills and Needs Assessment Survey”

• “Experience and Attitudes Towards Information Technology Among First-Year Medical Students in Denmark”

• “Using Claims Data to Examine Patients Using Practice-Based Internet Communication: Is There a Clinical Digital Divide?”

Journal sections have clearly defined editorial policies and identified contact editors. The sections are Editorials and Guest Editorials, Original Papers, Policy Papers and Proposals, Letters to the Editor, Reviews/Tutorials, Book Reviews and Critically Appraised Topics in Communication (CATCH-IT) Reports, Health Informatics, and Technology. Features of the journal include a rigorous but speedy peer-review process, an author acceptance rate of about 40%, and a $500 article fee with waivers and institutional memberships available. Advertisements are clearly identified, although their presence in the left-hand column and on page banners detracts from the scholarly appearance of the site.

The journal is a reliable, current, and well-maintained scientific publication. The current issue and archives are available through a search engine and the tables of contents on the journal Website and through Web search engines such as Google. An advantage of the electronic format is the incorporation of various dynamic multimedia capabilities in many articles, because the journal is not dependent on paper format. Emblematic of electronic publications, the JMIR is published continuously, offering information as it develops or as soon as articles are available (peer reviewed and copy edited). Articles are collated into four archival “issues” and one “volume” per year. Individuals can sign up to receive the table of contents of each issue via email.

JMIR is a nonprofit academic project, published free on the Internet. Institutional members may purchase subscriptions to print volumes for a fee. The editorial board is convinced that the Internet opens ways to publish and peer review scholarly work, independent of commercial publishers. They also think that research work should remain open to be shared and redistributed by others and that it should be available to anyone. JMIR serves as a “publishing laboratory” to explore and experiment with novel means of scholarly communication, including open source publishing, multimedia appendixes, and dynamic articles with real-time statistical analysis. The journal also experiments with cross-media publishing techniques, using extensible markup language (XML) and other technologies.

JMIR's disadvantages are related to the journal's advantages in that some fundamental issues are not yet clarified. For example, the openness of the information available through this research-oriented journal calls for the establishment of an ethical code of conduct for publishing raw data [1] and a better definition of the role of modern journals [2]. Neither of these issues has been clearly addressed by JMIR.