Digital health research and the three-thousand-dollar problem
Health is where article processing charges bite hardest, and where the research least able to pay is often the research most worth reading.
Article processing charges in health research are among the highest in any field. Several of the leading open access health journals charge between $3,000 and $6,000. That is a rounding error on a large pharmaceutical trial and an impossibility for a district health service evaluating whether its new triage tool is safe.
The consequence is predictable: the published evidence base on digital health skews toward well-funded deployments in wealthy health systems, which is close to the opposite of where most digital health deployment now happens.
What we publish
- Evaluations of clinical decision support, risk scores and triage tools as used in practice, including evaluations that find them unhelpful.
- Telemedicine and remote monitoring studies, especially ones that attend to who is left out.
- Health data governance, consent, secondary use and the gap between what patients believe they have agreed to and what they have.
- Qualitative work on how clinicians and patients actually use these systems, including the workarounds, which are usually where the interesting findings are.
- Health equity and access: how digital provision reaches or fails to reach underserved populations.
What we expect
Studies involving human participants must state ethical approval and consent procedures. We expect reporting to follow the relevant guideline for the design, CONSORT, STROBE, COREQ, SQUIRE as applicable, and we will ask for it if it is missing. A negative or null evaluation is publishable here and will be reviewed on its conduct, not its direction.
We are not a clinical journal and we do not publish primary clinical trials of treatments. We publish research about the systems through which care is organised, recorded and delivered.
Cost
Nothing, at any stage. For a health service, a public health team or a clinician-researcher without a publication budget, that is frequently the difference between an evaluation entering the record and sitting in an internal report nobody outside the organisation will ever read.