The Internet Journal Of Health: Publication Made Easy
M Ekong
Citation
M Ekong. The Internet Journal Of Health: Publication Made Easy. The Internet Journal of Health. 2008 Volume 8 Number 2.
Abstract
Surfing through the internet with the aim of retrieving available articles on the internet for a particular area of study, I stumbled on an article published in “The Internet Journal of Health”. Though this article was not in the area of interest as at that time, curiosity got the better part of me when I realized that the entire article was available and the research focus was in a known terrain. This further increased my interest and I decided to visit the author's guide section. I then realized that the journal published free, and articles were submitted online.
These are some of the benefits we do not enjoy in Africa. Other benefits of “The Internet journal of Health” includes: rapid peer review time, rapid online publication and availability of the complete article for perusal by any body.
In Africa, online journals are just springing up and even at this, articles published online are restricted to just the abstracts, and to access the main article one has to pay or subscribe. In other instances, the abstracts are not even available. Apart from these inadequacies, articles are still submitted in hard copy, which is cumbersome. Postal delay or sometime loss in transit of article could be even more disturbing since most of the time one does not know about the reason for delay to supposedly submitted article.
Apart from the afore-mentioned benefits of “The Internet Journal of Health”, we have really been exposed in Africa to diverse background of science, technology and research in other parts of the world. This journal has also presented a quick source of readily available articles on the internet enabling visitors to the journal easy access and at the same time exposing us the authors. This has really endeared scientist like me to this journal.
The journal has lived up to expectation, but can still thrive better if opportunities are given for visitors to comment on published articles because this may help improve are methodologies and communication with other scientist versed in such areas, and with increasing awareness, more articles will be publish which will call for the increase in issues per year.