Hepatitis Monthly: It is Time For a New Strategy Toward Publishing More and Better

Living in a region with a high prevalence of liver diseases especially Hepatitis B and C Virus infections is not sufficient to compensate the gap of knowledge in the field of hepatology. Despite the fact that the knowledge in the field of hepatology is in logarithmic increasing, we are still facing many challenges and gaps in hepatology. There are still many subjects that should be clarified by researchers and scientists but we should not forget knowledge of generation is quite different from publication and knowledge of translation. One of the previous challenges was absence of a peer reviewed high quality journal in general hepatology and hepatitis from developing countries particularly. By establishment of Hepatitis monthly as a leading journal in the field of hepatology in 2004, this tool became available to scientists and a tribune for presentation of research activities which mostly aimed on the real problems of daily practice. The journal aimed to make a link among researchers and clinicians to solve health problems and improve patient’s life quality. After nine years Hepatitis Monthly now is an international journal with a reasonable impact factor, indexed in major internationally recognized databases including ISI web of sciences and PubMed. The presence of a kind of transparent online submission system played an important role in journal progression. Progression was continuous in the journal’s quality during last five years and the number of submissions has increased dramatically, for instance it has been doubled since last year. Simultaneously and regards to using high level technologies for absorbing researcher’s attention toward latest publications and sharing our knowledge with them, we could establish a favorable framework to publish international original works from even outside of the region. After all, the journal has now the highest ranking position among all journals in the field of hepatology in Asia, Middle East and Africa based on ISI JCR report; 2012. With this position we are now receiving much more articles and due to limited space of publication our rejection rate is increasing more and more now approaching 70%. There were many outstanding articles that we had to reject only because of limited number of issues and articles per issue. The establishment of a robust editorial board, engagement of expert reviewers from abroad and settlement of stricter standards were considered as the main reasons for the mentioned alteration. Hence we have to extend our apologies to those whose submissions had been rejected not for that they were less valuable but because of the limited space availability of each issue. But now and by this message we announce to all our distinguished readers that Hepatitis Monthly succeed to open a new window toward its authors and readers. Form August 2012 we will publish our journal as an open access journal per article with no limitation in number of issues as well as articles. Thanks to the new open access strategy and omission of hard copy publishing we are able to publish all submitted manuscripts with acceptable standard of medical writing and methodology. Indexing in major and well known databases such ISI and PubMed make these articles more visible to researchers in near future. Respect to the journals’ policies and in cooperation with COPE guidelines; a clear approach in plagiarism detection and their treatment are recruited as well. These experiences trained us to be more serious regarding the human ethics and medical journalisms in future. Finally we would like to mention that all of us as scientists have a special responsibility regarding the science and our community. We should publish our experiences in such a better style. We should respond to the challenges and gaps in our scientific fields with relevant answers. Therefore again we invite all researchers in the field to send their valuable manuscripts to this journal. Certainly through this new policy we would see more relevant researches in a timely manner.