JMIR Publications introduced special COVID-19 theme issue in early 2020 to help authors publish coronavirus research rapidly.
(Toronto, July 20, 2021) JMIR Publications today announced the publication of its 1000th article as part of its special COVID-19 Theme Issue (e-collection), which spans across the publisher's portfolio of journals. On February 8, 2020, when the coronavirus disease was still unnamed and over a month before the World Health Organization (WHO) declared it a pandemic, JMIR Publications created a special COVID-19 e-collection and put out a special call for papers in JMIR Public Health and Surveillance to prioritize COVID-19 research papers, which was followed by other calls for papers spanning the entire JMIR portfolio of over 30 journals.
This milestone is a major accomplishment for JMIR Publications, as it targeted to fast track and disseminate COVID-19 research to global health care policy makers including a direct and immediate submission of accepted papers to the WHO.
“From the onset of the pandemic, JMIR Publications made it a priority to be a prime outlet of open-access research for COVID-19 clinical and public health/policy-relevant papers. We are offering a rapid submission, peer-review, and publication process, as well as rapid sharing with WHO, immediate availability on submission as a preprint, and immediate ahead-of-print availability in PubMed on the day of acceptance,” says Gunther Eysenbach, Chief Executive Officer and Executive Editor at JMIR Publications.
The theme issues cover topics such as conspiracy theories and misinformation (Infodemiology, 123 articles), digital interventions such as mHealth apps for COVID (78 articles), digital contact tracing (65 articles), and telehealth (127 articles), to mental health impacts of the pandemic (155 articles) and more recently, COVID-19 vaccination topics (18 articles).
Amaryllis Mavragani, highly-cited researcher at the University of Stirling and contributor to the theme issue, says, “Commitment to quick, instructive, and open peer review has always drawn me to JMIR Publications—I was very impressed to see the same speed and quality from both the author and the reviewer perspectives during the unprecedented challenges the research community has been facing during the pandemic. Authors can always expect to receive constructive comments from expert reviewers. To me, JMIR is the publisher showing that Open Science can indeed be the future.”
JMIR Publications would like to thank all the researchers, authors, reviewers, academic editors, and staff working with us and for us, for choosing JMIR Publications and making this theme issue possible.
The theme issue remains open for submissions. To learn more about the Call for Papers on COVID-19 research, click here.
Notable and highly cited articles in this theme issue include:
- Peer-to-Peer Contact Tracing: Development of a Privacy-Preserving Smartphone App: One of the first papers presenting the idea that mobile phones can be used to trace contacts with QR codes, accompanied by a highly cited guest editorial COVID-19 Contact Tracing and Data Protection Can Go Together
- Containing COVID-19 Among 627,386 Persons in Contact With the Diamond Princess Cruise Ship Passengers Who Disembarked in Taiwan: Big Data Analytics: A paper co-authored by the Vice-Premier of Taiwan, Chen-Chi Mai, who is a physician with a public health degree, demonstrating contact tracing of cruise ship passengers visiting Taiwan using mobile geolocation data
- Global Telemedicine Implementation and Integration Within Health Systems to Fight the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Call to Action: A highly cited paper calling policy makers to create the necessary regulatory frameworks for supporting wide adoption of telemedicine
- Effects of COVID-19 on College Students’ Mental Health in the United States: Interview Survey Study: High citation paper aimed at conducting a timely assessment of the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the mental health of college students
- COVID-19 and the 5G Conspiracy Theory: Social Network Analysis of Twitter Data: A paper looking to understand the drivers of the 5G COVID-19 conspiracy theory and strategies to deal with the misinformation associated with the conspiracy. You can watch Dr. Ahmed discuss his work with Dr. Jennifer Joe here
- Misinformation of COVID-19 on the Internet: Infodemiology Study: Looking at the quality and readability of online information about the coronavirus disease.
About JMIR Publications
JMIR Publications is the leading, born-digital, open-access publisher of academic journals and other innovative scientific communication products that focus on medicine, health, and technology. Its flagship journal, the Journal of Medical Internet Research, is the leading digital health journal globally in terms of quality and visibility in the medical informatics category and is the largest journal in the field.