We are pleased to announce that the 2017 volume of the Annual Review of Public Health, online today, is published open access under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) license. This influential content is now freely available to read, reuse, and share. Additionally, all 37 back volumes (1980-2016) are now free to read. Support for this initiative to increase openness and transparency in research is provided by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
“Thanks to the generous support of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the public health community will now be able to freely access expert reviews which critically summarize what is known about the most important health problems affecting our populations and gain insight into what can be done to improve collective outcomes,” said the journal’s Editor, Dr. Jonathan Fielding, Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, in the Fielding School of Public Health and the Geffen School of Medicine.
He added, “All Annual Review of Public Health articles summarize research findings, draw together and integrate strands of knowledge, assess practical applications, and point to unanswered questions. Expanding the availability of these articles and increasing the dissemination of the actionable information they contain has the potential to accelerate research and the speed at which new findings are assessed and implemented.
The Foundation’s support for the Annual Review of Public Health covers the costs of open access for one year, plus the exploration of sustainable funding mechanisms for future years.
“The opportunity to work with Annual Reviews is an exciting one for the Foundation. Reviews are important contributions to the evidence base for a Culture of Health and it’s important that they reach the widest audience possible,” said Dr. Brian Quinn, Associate Vice President for Research-Evaluation-Learning at the Foundation.
The focus of the open access movement to date has been on primary research papers and data sets; the public benefit of converting high-quality review journals to sustainable open access has yet to be assessed.
“I am confident that converting to open access will significantly benefit readers and researchers in the field of public health and beyond,” said President and Editor-in-Chief of Annual Reviews, Richard Gallagher. “We track downloads, citations, and altmetrics article by article, so we will be able to compare data before and after the switch to open access.”
Annual Reviews is establishing a collective fund to support the publication costs for the journal to sustain long-term open access. Customers who have paid a 2017 subscription for this journal will be asked permission to assign this payment to the collective fund. Our team will be in touch with current online subscribers to discuss this and other options available for those who do not wish to participate which include receiving a credit towards their 2018 subscriptions, selecting another 2017 Annual Review volume or receiving a full refund.
About the Annual Review of Public Health: The Annual Review of Public Health, in publication since 1980, covers significant developments in the field of public health, including key developments in epidemiology and biostatistics, environmental and occupational health, issues related to social environment and behavior, health services, and public health practice and policy. For further information about this post please email us.