Jumping up to the Next Step toward the World's Leading Journal in Primary Care Medicine

Dear Readers of the Korean Journal of Family Medicine (KJFM),

I am the new editor-in-chief of the KJFM, Seung-Kwon Myung, M.D., Ph.D. at the Department of Family Medicine, National Cancer Center, Korea. It's my great honor and pleasure to become the editor-in-chief of this journal newly, but on the other hand, I feel a great deal of burden and responsibility to develop the quality of the KJFM.

In this editorial, I would like to briefly tell our readers my key plans to make the KJFM jump up to the next step toward the world' leading journal in primary care medicine.

First, the KJFM will try to publish more papers than the past and more frequently. Definitely, one of the important aims of the journal might be to make many readers read and cite its papers as frequently as possible. Being an 'online-only' publication allows the journal to publish more papers than a print journal and save the cost of publishing. As of January 2014, the KJFM turned to online only publication. Also, in order to publish more papers, we will improve the current peer-review process including shortening the review period and consider employing PLOS ONE's 'publish first, judge later' publication concept.1) This idea does not use the perceived importance of a paper as a criterion for acceptance or rejection. Instead, they publish any paper that is methodologically sound or any research that was conducted rigorously, and leave it to the scientific community to ascertain importance, post publication, through debated and comment.2) Due to PLOS ONE's unique publication methodology and business strategy, since its publication of 138 articles in the first year, 2006, PLOS ONE published 31,500 papers in 2013, and its 2013 impact factor was 3.534.3) Although there are some critiques on PLOS ONE's publication strategy, its strengths could be adopted for the development of our journal.

Second, we will invite outstanding foreign university professors of the department of family medicine or other researchers in the field of primary care medicine as international editors in the KJFM. This helps our journal to be known to many primary care physicians around the world. More importantly, one of the criteria for being selected in the Science Citation Index (SCI) is the international diversity of the editorial board members.

Last, we will make every effort to let the KJFM be indexed in the SCI in the near future. The Thomson Reuters journal selection process mainly considers the journal's basic publishing standards (e.g., timeliness of publication, international editorial conventions, full text English, and peer review), its editorial content, the international diversity of its authorship, and the citation data associated with it.4) To meet these criteria, we will thoroughly review the KJFM publishing process and ameliorate it.

I hope the KJFM readers and members of the Korean Academy of Family Medicine take an active interest in our journal's development and give advice.