The ''Medical Journal of Australia'' is a

peer-reviewed Peer review is the evaluation of work by one or more people with similar competencies as the producers of the work ( peers). It functions as a form of self-regulation by qualified members of a profession within the relevant field. Peer revie ...

medical journal A medical journal is a peer-reviewed scientific journal that communicates medical information to physicians, other health professionals. Journals that cover many medical specialties are sometimes called general medical journals. History The fi ...

published 22 times a year. It is the official journal of the

Australian Medical Association The Australian Medical Association (AMA) is an Australian public company by guarantee formed as a professional association for Australian doctors and medical students. The association is not run by the Australian Government and does not regu ...

, published by Wiley on behalf of the Australasian Medical Publishing Company. The journal publishes editorials, original research, guideline summaries, narrative reviews, perspectives, medical education, reflections, and letters. The full text of every issue since January 2002 is available online.

History

Early origins

The journal was established in 1856, when communication between Australian states and other English-speaking nations entailed long delays. The journal was both a platform for Australian medical research, as well as educational reviews summarising research done overseas. It has since been renamed several times: *''Australian Medical Journal'' (1856–1895) *''Intercolonial Quarterly Journal of Medicine and Surgery'' (1895–1896) *''Intercolonial Medical Journal of Australasia'' (1896–1909) *''Australian Medical Journal'' (1910–1914) *''Medical Journal of Australia'' (1914–present, with volume numbering restarting at 1)

Elsevier

In 2015, then

editor-in-chief An editor-in-chief (EIC), also known as lead editor or chief editor, is a publication's editorial leader who has final responsibility for its operations and policies. The highest-ranking editor of a publication may also be titled editor, managing ...

Stephen Leeder was suddenly removed after criticising the decision to outsource production of the journal to the global publishing giant

Elsevier Elsevier () is a Dutch academic publishing company specializing in scientific, technical, and medical content. Its products include journals such as '' The Lancet'', '' Cell'', the ScienceDirect collection of electronic journals, '' Trends'', ...

. Leerder's concerns revolved around an incident in 2009 when Elsevier accepted payments from pharmaceutical company Merck & Co. to publish journals such as the '' Australasian Journal of Bone & Joint Medicine'', which had the appearance of peer-reviewed academic works but were in fact promoting Merck. Following the decision to sack Leeder, all but one of the journal's editorial advisory committee resigned and wrote to Australian Medical Association president Brian Owler asking him to review the decision. Nicholas Talley succeeded Stephen Leeder as editor-in-chief in September 2015 and the editorial advisory group was subsequently reconstituted.

Wiley

From January 2019, the journal is published by Wiley. Print distribution remains with the Australasian Medical Publishing Company and editorial direction and decisions remain with the journal.

Publishing and access

Having previously published under a subscription model, the journal changed in January 2012 to make all of its research articles free to read online. The journal converted to a hybrid model in January 2019: Authors can either pay an article processing fee to publish fully open access (

gold open access Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined (according to the 2001 definition), or Gratis v ...

) or archive the submitted version of their article in online repositories (

green open access Self-archiving is the act of (the author's) depositing a free copy of an electronic document online in order to provide open access to it. The term usually refers to the self-archiving of peer-reviewed research journal and conference articles, as ...

). In order to demonstrate commitment to Australian Indigenous health and health awareness, the journal makes all Indigenous health articles free to access without charging authors.

Abstracting and indexing

The journal is abstracted and indexed in: According to the Clarivate's ''

Journal Citation Reports ''Journal Citation Reports'' (''JCR'') is an annual publicationby Clarivate Analytics (previously the intellectual property of Thomson Reuters). It has been integrated with the Web of Science and is accessed from the Web of Science-Core Colle ...

'', the journal had a 2020

impact factor The impact factor (IF) or journal impact factor (JIF) of an academic journal is a scientometric index calculated by Clarivate that reflects the yearly mean number of citations of articles published in the last two years in a given journal, as ...

of 7.738, ranked 17th of 160 in the world in General and Internal Medicine category.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Medical Journal Of Australia Publications established in 1856 General medical journals English-language journals Biweekly journals Wiley (publisher) academic journals