Building on a commitment to move evidence into action, AcademyHealth is pleased to unveil a new publishing platform for its open access, peer reviewed journal eGEMs. This new, more modern platform better serves authors and readers alike, allowing eGEMs to continue to build on the journals’ remarkable success capturing, documenting and disseminating innovations that drive a learning health system.
“With private and public sector forces creating never-before-seen increases in the volume, variety and velocity of health data, health systems are struggling with the best way to translate all that data into useful knowledge,” said eGEMs Executive Editor Paul Wallace. “eGEMs fills a unique void – helping readers understand how we learn from health data with a focus on the nuts-and-bolts of conducting analysis and digging into the real world lessons gleaned by colleagues using these tools.”
The new platform, provided by Ubiquity Press, features a streamlined author and peer reviewer interface, commenting ability, social media integration and publication of papers in multiple formats. More importantly, Ubiquity is committed to open access publishing where authors retain full copyright of their work and AcademyHealth maintains full ownership of the journal.
“While researchers have always been able to share study results through existing peer-reviewed journals, the brilliance behind those results is often left in the shadows,” Wallace said. “eGEMs brings those lessons to light so that readers can understand how the data and methods were used and how they could be replicated or adapted.” These lessons include insights from emerging methods such machine learning, big data analysis, data mining and modeling all aimed at improving health and the performance of the health system.
One such example, a series of papers authored by researchers at the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, reveals a new model for monitoring the health of communities that is more efficient than traditional methods while still providing reliable information about a population’s health. Authors compared results from NYC Macroscope, New York City’s first electronic health record surveillance system, to two different traditional surveys and found that NYC Macroscope prevalence estimates for obesity, hypertension, smoking, and diabetes were comparable to the survey results.
Since its inception in 2013, eGEMs has been supported by a time limited grant from the Agency for Healthcare Quality and Research (AHRQ). AHRQ’s generous support covered the journal’s article processing charges (APCs) for the past four years. In order to be sustainable and maintain open access status, eGEMs now charges an APC of $1,800 per published paper. This fee covers the cost of managing rigorous peer review, thorough copyediting and layout design as well as publication and promotion.
“AcademyHealth is committed to supporting eGEMs’ impact on improving health care delivery by maintaining its open access status,” said Lisa Simpson, CEO and President of AcademyHealth. “At a time of such rapid change, we are committed to supporting open science to spread promising approaches rapidly in a more open and transparent environment—both to accelerate innovation and to reduce redundancy. The new platform and business model will allow this acceleration to continue for years to come.”
To learn more about eGEMs, read the latest Call for Papers, explore the new platform, or read about opportunities to support this work, please visit www.egems.org or contact us at egems@academyhealth.org.