This is a historical issue of JAMIA: It is the last time the journal will be printed and mailed to our subscribers, some of whom have grown accustomed to receiving it in print every 2 months for the past 23 years. After this issue, all future issues will only be made available online, thus reflecting our professional society’s evolution to a “green” approach to academic publishing. The online format will also allow us to increase the frequency of journal issues, which will now be published monthly.
With the removal of print media, the partnership with digital object repositories and the increased visibility of metrics related to access and utilization will help us take the first steps toward having an “executable paper,” in other words, an article of record that includes digital objects that can be easily found and whose work can be more easily reproduced, adapted, and/or enhanced by interested readers. The inaugural online-only issue in January will present various articles describing different components on which an executable paper relies: interoperable, shareable digital objects containing data, as well as tools (software, workflows) and processes that are particularly important for biomedical data sciences. The executable paper will evolve from these components, many of which are already being described in JAMIA articles.
This issue of JAMIA includes articles on assessing data quality, a top priority in informatics, since little value is derived from poor-quality data. A longitudinal analysis of electronic health record (EHR) data in a large pediatric network (p. 1072), automatic identification of implausible values (p. 1080), a call for formalization of drug indications (p. 1169), a study on biases introduced by filtering out EHRs with incomplete data (p. 1134), and a review on evidence appraisal (p. 1192) describe critical issues in evaluating the quality of data and of the derived knowledge. A tutorial on blockchain (p.1211) explains how this technology enables immutable ledgers that allow verification of data provenance and transformations.
Disseminating data-driven approaches to produce generalizable knowledge is also critical to JAMIA. Many articles in this issue address highly important topics in biomedical informatics in general, and biomedical data science in particular. For example, we include articles that are prime examples of statistical or machine learning methods in support of health care or biomedical science: predictive models for lung cancer (p. 1046), acute (p. 1052) and chronic (p.1111) kidney injury, and asthma exacerbation (p. 1116); algorithms to identify nonmedical opioid use (p. 1204); and a hybrid system to identify clinical trial reports (p. 1165).
Informatics is not limited to the generation of new knowledge from data via learning techniques; it is also concerned with how this information is effectively used in practice. Clinical implications ofinformatics systems, such as the effect of health information exchange on recognizing medication discrepancies (p. 1095), automated laboratory results notification (p. 1173), optimization of drug alerts (p. 1149), clinical sequencing of exome reports (p.1184), participatory design of decision support tools for nurses (p. 1102), eligibility criteria extraction from clinical trials (p. 1062), and the origins of the divide in advanced EHR adoption, are featured in this issue. The use of Facebook to combat Zika (p. 1155) and of information technology to support patient engagement (p.1088), and the effectiveness of bilingual patient portals (p. 1160) are also presented.
JAMIA is continuously evolving, and the next issue will mark the beginning of a new phase, in which we will see innovation not only in content, but in format and scope. We will continue to publish early access articles online as soon as they are ready, but the faster indexing into monthly journal issues will allow our authors to refer to the final versions of their articles sooner, and allow the editorial team to have more flexibility in publishing materials and grouping the articles. We expect the online format to increase the number of articles that integrate various digital objects, which may also require new forms of peer review and attribution that have not yet been widely utilized. However, authors will continue to have a venue to disseminate their best work – regardless of their ability to pay author fees – and readers will continue to benefit from a rigorous peer-review process that selects the most valuable submissions for publication.