Fostering Strategic Changes in Publishing: Journal of Korean Medical Science in 2018

The Open Access movement has changed scholarly publishing forever and enormously influenced progress in scientific research and editing.1 Authors, reviewers, and editors are now offered numerous benefits of the Open Access, including those increasing their global visibility and prospects of networking with potential collaborators.2 The digitization of academic journals has accelerated knowledge transfer and impact of research in many ways. Targeting open access journals with relevant indexing and archiving in globally recognized repositories, such as PubMed Central, is now essential for increasing the impact of scholarly output.3 Some of the traditional attributes of publishing, and particularly volume of print circulation, are gradually losing their importance and influence on the journal impact metrics.

With that in mind, the Journal of Korean Medical Science (JKMS) is changing its publishing and editing strategies in 2018. One of the great achievements for our journal in 2017 was a decision to switch to the online submission and peer review system powered by the Editorial Manager^® (Aries Systems Co., North Andover, MA, USA). While this change raises publishing costs to some extent, it also allows improving the peer review and swift selection of expert reviewers and meeting the requirements of the global audience. We hope that the new manuscript submission and processing system will be well accepted by our contributors in 2018. They are now invited to build up or update their profiles in the new system and provide links to their individual online profiles (i.e., the Open Researcher and Contributor ID).

The second important change is the move to online-only and weekly publishing format in 2018. Since its launch in 1986 and until 2008, the JKMS was a print-only source. The website of the journal was established in 2008, and online publishing format was launched in that year. The JKMS moved to the immediate Open Access mode in 2010, and its print copies have gradually reduced since then. Finally, a decision was made to opt for online-only publishing in 2018. Such a move will reduce publishing costs enormously and will allow spending more on the development of its online-only edition. We will print only 10 hard copies for permanent archiving purposes. Our audience will continue accessing and reading JKMS articles freely at the https://jkms.org website, which is powered by the KAMJE Press (XMLink, Seoul, Korea).

We are also planning to change format of our articles. The layout of individual articles will be based on one column, which may improve online readability. Several unique features of JKMS will be further improved to follow the style of the top general medical journals (e.g., JAMA).

In addition to these publishing changes, which are in line with the vision and mission statements of the Korean Association of Medical Journal Editors,4 we will work on improving our editorial workflow and crediting our contributors for their professional support and loyalty. Hopefully, all these changes will encourage our authors, readers, and reviewers to contribute more and refer to individual online articles in their best research articles and social media communications.