Is there a need for a new journal devoted to preventive medicine?

It is axiomatic that there has never been so much research productivity as in the present time. Not only are there more trained scientists alive and productive today than at any other point in history, but the last 25 years have also brought ever increasing gains in the speed and quantity of information delivery and in our ability to store scientific knowledge electronically. This is certainly true of medical knowledge as well, and by extension, of the scientific discoveries and knowledge translation insights that help society to avert illness, prolong life, and promote health for individuals and their communities. Therefore, the answer to the question in the title of this editorial is an unequivocal ‘yes’, if we assume quite simplistically that the exponential gains in research productivity represent knowledge that is all of high quality and relevance to advance the theory and practice of preventive medicine. A more refined question is: How will this new journal operate? As the founding co-editors of Preventive Medicine Reports (PMR), we bring our new journal to the scientific community at a time when the business of scholarly publishing is being drastically remodeled. The advent of the ‘open access’ concept in academic publishing democratized access to scientific knowledge by making all papers freely available to anyone with an Internet connection, thus eliminating the need for an individual or institution to have a paid subscription. It was able to do so by shifting the costs of publishing to the source of information, i.e., authors, their institutions, and by association, the research funding agencies. Publishing electronically also lowered the costs of being an academic publisher enormously. The ‘open access’ model has begun to abolish the centuries-long inequality in access to knowledge, which had historically placed investigators in developing countries at a major disadvantage relatively to their counterparts in resource-rich settings. This inequality was particularly poignant in preventive medicine. The very countries with the greatest need for access to scientific discoveries that could alleviate their key public health concerns were prevented from doing so because their scientists and academic institutions could not afford it. The enormous success of organizations such as Public Library of Science (PLOS) and Biomed Central (BMC), which devoted themselves entirely as publishers of multiple open-access journals, was the most notable transformation in academic publishing in the last 15 years. One of these journals, PLOS One, went from a respectable 138 papers in its inaugural year in 2006 to become the largest scientific journal in the world and in history, with 31,500 articles published in 2013 alone [1]. To a large extent, the spectacular success of PLOS One stemmed from its approach of not reaching decisions on whether to prioritize for peer review and publication based on criteria of relevance and interest to readers set a priori by editors and reviewers. With print journal space concerns largely obviated in the new era of electronic publishing, PLOS One's editorial policy is to accept for publication all submissions that contain intelligibly written and sound scientific findings from yet unpublished primary research studies that were conducted ethically and with integrity [2]. Peer review ensures that the decision to publish is based on pertinent content and methodological expertise. The success of this model of sound-science exclusive review is now being adopted by other traditional publishers, and is likely to dictate much of what will happen with scientific publishing in the future. The down side of the open-access model is that it was quickly perceived by pseudo-scholarly publishers as a relatively easy way to make money via catering to credulous scientists with an urgent need to publish their results. These so-called ‘predatory publishers’ [3] are likely the majority of the providers of what passes for scientific knowledge today under the guise of open access publishing. A recent compilation of potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers included 589 entries, an enormous growth since 2011 when the list was first compiled and included only 18 publishers [4]. The need for PMR arises from the fact that much high quality research in prevention is of a more specialized or regional nature, but which contains sound scientific findings worthy of being placed in the public domain. By opening this new avenue, we seek to enhance knowledge translation in preventive medicine and public health. We would like to attract such important research material to PMR, a journal that is maintained by the largest of the reputable academic publishers, Elsevier. PMR will follow the open access, sound-science centered peer review model pioneered by PLOS One, which is described in our scope and aims statement as follows: “Preventive Medicine Reports is an international, open-access peer-reviewed journal affiliated with Preventive Medicine, the medical journal founded by Ernst Wynder in 1972. Like its parent journal, Preventive Medicine Reports publishes original, scholarly manuscripts on the science and practice of disease prevention, health promotion, and public health policymaking but seeks to broaden our understanding and perspective on these topics by including a wider selection of geographic and population specific studies. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the impact of lifestyle and interventions on health and the role of the man-made environment on lifestyle choices. The journal welcomes submissions, especially primary reports, on the science of preventing chronic and infectious diseases; the effects of the chemical, physical, and biological environment on health, and research on the relations between socioeconomic status, health disparities, and access to care. Preventive Medicine Reports also publishes papers that have a subspecialty angle or a methodological focus. Its primary goal is to serve as a scholarly repository for the building blocks of research knowledge that inform practice and policy in disease prevention and health promotion.” Many well established subscription journals have spawned offshoot open access journals. Elsevier has had a positive experience with this model in some of its journals. For example, Molecular Genetics and Metabolism, a subscription journal, has spawned MGM Reports, an exclusively open access journal. Other Elsevier journals that are in the same pairing model are: Cell and Cell Reports, The Lancet and The Lancet Global Health, and Gene and Meta Gene. In general, they have the benefit of simplifying authors' work by allowing a manuscript to be transferred to the sister journal along with the reviewers' critiques. With PMR and its direct cooperation with its parent journal, Preventive Medicine, we have a great opportunity to innovate in scholarly publishing in public health and give authors the opportunity to keep their valid work with an established academic journal. The same experienced editorial office team that manages Preventive Medicine will maintain the day-to-day operation for PMR. Its decisions will receive guidance from a stellar editorial board of seasoned scientists, as well as from the input of ad hoc reviewers registered in a database of nearly 4000 experienced academics and practitioners of preventive medicine. Our intent is to attract the attention of our colleagues in the fields of preventive medicine and health promotion. We are confident that PMR will earn the trust and credibility that Preventive Medicine already enjoys. As co-editors we pledge to procure competent, insightful, and unbiased peer reviews for all papers that fit the scope of PMR. Between the two of us, we have more than 60 years of experience in the epidemiology of chronic and infectious diseases, psychosocial research, and the behavioral sciences, which will give PMR an eclectic skillset with which to start fresh in this brave new world of scholarly publishing.

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