The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) in Canada has just announced that the Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR) will be awarded a $90.000 grant over the next 3 years. In the decision letter the agency writes that the adjudication committee "recognized the quality of the journal and saw that it was making an impact on the field." It "judged the editor-in-chief to be highly competent, the reviewers to have been well-chosen and the publication plan presented to be entirely sound and reasonable."
The SSHRC is funding 142 journals over the next 3 years under their Aid to Scholarly Journals 2008 competition, selected among 186 funding proposals.
In 2007, JMIR has already won a SSHRC grant for Open Access journals. The founding editor-in-chief and publisher of JMIR, Dr Gunther Eysenbach, who created JMIR 10 years ago as one of the pioneering Open Access journals in medicine, has also been nominated for several awards for his personal contributions to open science and knowledge translation, and his contributions to ehealth and medical informatics.
The editorial board and publisher is thrilled about the outcome of the SSHRC competition. Only 4 years ago, JMIR was discouraged to submit a proposal to this competition, because it is an Open Access journal - 4 years ago, SSHRC did not consider to fund journals with no "subscribers". The policy change at SSHRC - to fund Open Access journals - is partly a result of intense lobbying of JMIR and others - see for example the submission by Gunther Eysenbach in response to the SSHRC-CFHSS Consultation on Open Access to Publicly Funded Research (2005) (Archived by WebCite® at http://www.webcitation.org/5cP2FNrRb)