Changing the editorial crew at the IJE

Two of the strengths of the IJE are its international reach and variety of quality content. Over its lifetime, the Journal has been served by several Editors:

Changing Editors brings periodic renewal. With the editorial team now located in Sydney, Australia (the first time outside the UK), we have taken seriously our responsibility to review how to contribute to the Journal’s evolution.

So, on 30–31 March 2017, 11 members of the Editorial Board, the president (Dame Valerie Beral) and president-elect (Henrique Barros) of the International Epidemiological Association (IEA), and Allen Stevens from our publisher, Oxford University Press, met the editorial team in Sydney to review progress and plan the Journal’s immediate future.

The two days of useful discussion led to the following main outcomes.

1. The Journal should continue to concentrate on maintaining its current high standards of published material, taking account of the most pressing public health problems to which epidemiology proposes solutions, to strengthen our ties with the IEA and its membership.

2. The meeting acknowledged the crucial importance of the Journal increasingly providing evidence and guidance of use to practitioners, especially epidemiologists involved in public health practice, and to help solve the ‘big problems’ in epidemiology and public health. Several participants considered that more thought should be given to meeting the needs of readers and suggested a survey of subscribers. The Editorial Board, itself, should be as representative as possible of geography and fields of interest.

3. Given that more than 60% of the Journal’s content is drawn from Europe and North America, much discussion concerned the publishing of research from more international contributors, particularly in the non-Anglophone world. We are aware that this has been a long-standing concern.

4. We affirmed our pleasure in receiving from George Davey Smith and Shah Ebrahim—together with Jane Ferrie and the rest of their team—supported by Oxford University Press, a journal which, with an impact factor in 2016 of 7.7, ranks fifth among public health and epidemiology journals. It is notable for the quality of its science and its enthusiasm for epidemiological progress. We have been handed a great gift, with associated responsibility.

5. We noted the volatility of scientific publication, where a contest is being played out between online and print publication, and between subscription or paywall models and open-access (author pays) models. The number of print copies of each IJE issue is reducing year on year and is now fewer than 200. They are costly to produce and distribute. On the other hand, the IJE is now accessible online in over 7000 institutions worldwide and to the 2000 IEA members. Each month, about 175 000 articles are downloaded. Our online status allows us to publish more open-access material, thus providing accessibility to all users. In 2016, we published 92 open-access articles. We need to keep a close watch on the direction in which the publishing world is heading: there are advantages and disadvantages in being print-only, online-only or a mix. The point was stressed that, if we are true to our discipline, such decisions should, as far as possible, be based on evidence.

6. The Journal operates from a comparatively slender financial base. The IEA is not a wealthy organization. Its journal needs to be run parsimoniously, with major unpaid contributions from its editors (including me!) and with the support of the institutions hosting the editorial team. We are looking carefully at citation and usage patterns of our different types of articles, to assess their value to readers and authors. We want to ensure that we prioritize those areas most important to our readership and the epidemiological community, and not spend time on poorly conceived material.

7. To overcome a backlog in the print publication of accepted papers, especially cohort profiles, we discussed publishing the bulk of waiting cohort profiles as online only articles in an issue. We have now done this, publishing the waiting cohort profiles as e-pages listed in the contents of the April 2017 issue. This provides final citation details for each article. If this proves successful, we will consider whether this approach could expedite publication of the backlog of original articles.

This meeting was the beginning of our periodic conversations as members of the Editorial Board, the editorial team, the IEA and Oxford University Press. Our next face-to-face meeting will be at the IEA World Congress of Epidemiology in Saitama, Japan, on 19–22 August 2017. We hope that this will provide an opportunity for the editors to meet, and hear from, as many IEA members about their expectations and hopes for the next phase of the IJE’s growth and development.