Abstract
We are celebrating the acceptance, on 14 April 2017, of the Journal of Feline Medicine and Surgery Open Reports (JFMS Open Reports) into PubMed Central. This is a milestone moment for the new journal, and will be a significant benefit to authors and readers.
At its launch in May 2015, JFMS Open Reports joined the Journal of Feline Medicine and Surgery (JFMS) as a peer-reviewed source of clinically relevant information for practitioners and researchers interested in the healthcare of domestic cats. Those familiar with its sister title will see that it bears a close resemblance. JFMS Open Reports is managed by the same editorial team, and shares the same hard-working and expert editorial board.
From the outset, the editorial team had PubMed Central indexing in its sights for JFMS Open Reports. It considered it such a key step for the journal’s development that it started the process for approval at the earliest allowable opportunity – the point at which it had published 25 peer-reviewed articles.
The evaluation process took over a year and, here we are now, with well over 100 published articles, all fully indexed. A great achievement!
So what is PubMed Central, and why is this really so significant?
Set up in 2000, PubMed Central is a free electronic archive of full-text biomedical and life sciences journal articles. It is operated by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), a division of the National Library of Medicine (NLM) at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). Since its inception, it has grown from comprising only two journals, to several thousand; at the time of writing this editorial, its archive extends to over 4.3 million articles! PubMed Central is selective about what journal content it indexes. To participate, a journal must meet high standards: both in scientific quality and in the technical quality of its digital files (Figure 1).
JFMS Open Reports underwent a successful evaluation by PubMed Central of the scientific and editorial quality of its content, as well as the technical quality of its digital files
PubMed Central offers an extremely useful tool for clinicians seeking the most up-to-date clinical information for practice or research. For our authors, the value lies in the fact that their articles become more discoverable than ever before. Most researchers search PubMed – the overarching database search engine for research. Courtesy of this exciting development, they will now be able to search PubMed for feline research across both journals at the same time.
Indexing in PubMed Central is a quality acknowledgement: a guarantee that the research we publish is of a high standard.
Our vision for JFMS Open Reports was that it would publish the best peer-reviewed clinical reports in feline medicine and surgery. With over 50,000 downloads since launch, it is rapidly establishing itself as the go-to resource for high-quality case reports, short case series and short communications reporting regional prevalence data or other data related to well-recognised diseases of cats.
Indexing in PubMed Central is a quality acknowledgement: a guarantee that the research we publish is of a high standard. It puts the journal on the firmest of footings as we move forwards.