THE TRANSFER OF OWNERSHIP OF OJPHI-TO JMIR PUBLICATIONS

Happy New Year to all the stakeholders of OJPHI.  As stated in my latest announcement, OJPHI has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with a major biomedical informatics publishing company, JMIR Publications.

After the negotiations are finalized, JMIR will assume all responsibilities related to the publication of OJPHI. The Journal is in this situation because our review process has slowed down considerably during the pandemic, pushing it towards unsustainability. We currently have 90 papers under review or not-yet-assigned to reviewers in our pipeline.

While I am working with our current reviewers to expedite the process, JMIR will provide additional reviewers to assist OJPHI. Traditionally, JMIR’s turnaround time is under 2 months. We could get all these papers reviewed and the accepted ones published before the end of April 2023.

The current publication fee for OJPHI is $450 per accepted paper. This fee is roughly 20% of the average $2,500 charged by peer-reviewed biomedical informatics journals. Under the terms of our negotiation, the authors of all the articles in the OJPHI pipeline will pay the current $450.00 when the papers are accepted.  All new submissions to OJPHI in 2023 will attract a fee of $1,500. This is less than the JMIR fee of $2,500.

I am appealing to all our reviewers to expedite the review process and take advantage of the current fee of $450.00

Again, I am wishing all our readers, authors, reviewers and editors, a very happy new year. Let us all strive to make OJPHI a sustainable journal.

Best,

Edward Mensah, PhD

Editor-in-Chief, OJPHI

Emeritus Assoc. Professor of Health Economics and Informatics

School of Public Health

dehasnem@uic.edu