The JPHC has come a long way in a very short timeOut of Five Stars

High quality content
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Up-to-date
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Good presentation
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Level of unfettered access
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Useful patient information
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Interactive CME
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www.jphc.org
www.rnzcgp.org.nz/journal-of-primary-health-care
This month we are reviewing the RNZCGP's very own impressive open access Journal of Primary Health Care (JPHC) - but more on that later.

In December 2005, we did a review on the open access journal portal BioMed Central (BMC). The London-based BMC publishing house has gone from strength to strength since then with an increasingly comprehensive resource in the biomedical sciences.

In 2008 it was sold to biomedical print publisher Springer and is now heading the "Top 20 Publishers" list by a country mile in the Index Copernicus. 

BioMed Central provides a portal of access to its 223 journals, a substantial number of these published on behalf of affiliated providers. The standardised and authoritative format of their journals appears to have given BMC a very impressive foothold in what some might perceive as the struggle against the previous dominance and inaccessibility of the expensive "toll access" medical publishing houses (such as Springer and Elsevier).

This has doubtless been assisted with the provision of free open access software systems such as "Open Journal Systems" (from the Canadian Public Knowledge Project) which can enable start-up journals to get going at minimal cost.

Despite all this, BMC freely admits to being a for-profit enterprise and charges authors around NZ$2500 to have their papers published in its journals, though they also curiously claim to waive fees completely for authors from low-income countries.

Perhaps the infamous PIIGS group (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain) now come into that category, and others may well follow.

Revenues for BMC in 2008 were a healthy US$24.5 million. Papers can get published within weeks and some have aptly referred to this sort of medical publishing as "vanity publishing".

Independent portals such as the Directory of Open Access Journals (www.doaj.org) also list the full BMC collection together with a whole range of others from the medical and non-medical fields.

For those with only a tangential interest in medicine and health there are optional listings available from agriculture and food sciences to arts and architecture.

Among several "me-too" entrepreneurial open access publishers is a group called OMICS at www.omicsonline.org, an opportunistic BMC lookalike - based overtly in the US but much more substantially it seems in Hyderabad, India.

Googling OMICS gave some rather extraordinary feedback from various blogsites and related commentaries. Curious feedback such as editors (often under or non-qualified) being appointed to various editorial boards without their knowledge or permission. The OMICS websites have poor English and spelling errors and they also have a rather bad name on Google for treating their Indian staff badly and of course extorting fees from Third World authors in order to get their works published.

Just what an opportunistic and less-than altruistic open access publisher such as OMICS is trying to achieve seemed curiously elusive to me, but on a little delving it surely appears the ambitious wannabe-author-speakers are the collective pot of gold. Indeed, this is not "journals as we used to know them".

The OMICS company also runs "world conferences" which have pay-to-talk speaker spots available and which seem to be simply income-generating exercises with a dismal academic footing - and embarrassingly tiny attendances if their photo galleries are anything to go by.  Just how this crowd from Hyderabad got to number nine on the Index Copernicus is quite beyond me but strange things can happen in India (population 1210 million).

To cap all that off, I then uncovered an alternative
start-up Journal of Primary Health Care in the OMICS 100-title stable. No, not our good old college New Zealand Family Physician upgrade but a new kid on the block with the same name. And, again, a rather curious blend of editors with an equally curious array of biographies. Looking at its aims, this eccentric newcomer might be more aptly re-titled the "Journal of Primitive Health Care".

The authoritative New Zealand-based JPHC has always been open access, starting in March 2009, and is, of course, the current flagship journal of the RNZCGP. In 2010, it was approved and indexed under Medline - no mean feat and a genuine tribute to the foresight, enthusiasm and commitment of editor Felicity Goodyear-Smith.

The journal (classified as "gold open access") has rapidly evolved into an internationally recognised publication with a focus on medical and socio-medical issues affecting the local primary care environment in New Zealand.

The published aim and scope is to "meet the information needs of New Zealand GPs, practice nurses and community pharmacists plus other primary healthcare practitioners and the patients and communities we serve".

The main sections in our gold journal include original scientific papers: substantially less frequent than in our venerable old New Zealand Family Physician but the papers are also tightly categorised under such subheadings as Quantitative Research, Qualitative Research, Mixed Method Research plus Systematic Reviews, Short Reports etc.

There are other sections on Improving Performance, and the popular Back to Back series. Added to that are PEARLS, Cochrane reviews, a selection of options in alternative, Maori and traditional medicine, Ethics and Essays, Potion or Poison? and Nuggets of Knowledge.

All in all the JPHC has come a long way in a very short time. It was indexed in Medline in 2010 (after just four issues of publication) and is also now indexed in PubMed, Excerpta Medica (Embase), Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINAHL), Scopus and Index New Zealand (INNZ). JPHC can be accessed via its own website (www.jphc.org) or the college's.