Australian Prescriber is confirming its place as a trusted source of independent information by meeting the new standards of scholarly publication.1
We are pleased to announce that Australian Prescriber has been accepted for inclusion in PubMed Central – a free archive of full-text biomedical and life sciences journal articles, hosted by the US National Library of Medicine.
Starting from this issue (Volume 39, Number 1), all articles will be available through PubMed Central within a month. Back issues of Australian Prescriber will also be added over time.
Inclusion in PubMed Central is a significant milestone for Australian Prescriber. Readers will now be able to search for and access Australian Prescriber articles through PubMed – the database of choice for researching medical literature.
Other developments include the assignment of digital object identifiers (DOIs) to all articles in Australian Prescriber through CrossRef. DOIs are links that preserve the scholarly citation record. In addition to displaying our own DOIs, we will include the DOI of each of the cited references if they have one. This will make it easier for our readers to link directly to other relevant articles.
Australian Prescriber will soon start using Altmetrics as an alternative to traditional impact factors. Altmetrics is an online tool that will monitor the impact of our articles across traditional and social media, online reference managers, post-publication peer-review sites, and public policy documents. Watch out for the Altmetrics badge or ‘doughnut’ displayed next to Australian Prescriber’s most popular articles. It will give a score indicating the quantity and quality of attention the article has received. Readers can click on the badge and get direct access to the online conversations about the article.
Australian Prescriber has been freely available online since 1996, and has been listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals since 2003. With the rise in online ‘predatory’ journals,1 however, the requirements for inclusion in the directory have increased. We are now in the process of meeting these new standards.
