It may have come to your attention that JOR Spine has been accepted by PubMed Central (PMC) and is now fully indexed. All past issues of JOR Spine are now available online. Future issues will be indexed automatically as they are published. As a researcher, we have always enjoyed this useful function of PMC, but what is it? “PMC” is a primary information database managed and operated by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) established as a division of the National Library of Medicine (NLM) that manages and operates MEDLINE. On March 1999, Harold Vermouth, a 1989 Nobel Laureate (Physiology and Medicine Award) and director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), proposed to generate a free online service that enables access to research results published in the biomedical field. PMC is not a secondary information database like MEDLINE or PubMed, but contains open access online paper archive. The service started in February 2000, and the number of papers currently recorded is over 3.3 million. We would like to acknowledge all authors, reviewers, editors and the editorial team at Wiley for their hard work and in helping JOR Spine to reach this milestone in the fastest track possible.
On the other hand, when looking back at our publications on this special moment of achievement, one can see that the majority of submissions are from North America. The JOR Spine is committed to creating a globalized platform for spine research publishing. In order to enhance our scope, we will initiate publication of a “Global Review Series,” which will include review papers from focused regions throughout the world. We hope to see volunteers for guest editorship and active submissions to this new initiative so that JOR Spine can gain further attention internationally, and emerge as the journal in which to publish the best spine research.
We shall keep climbing!