Hamdan Medical Award has launched its official journal "Hamdan Medical Journal", formerly called Journal of Medical Sciences. The journal is named after H.H. Sheikh Hamdan Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Deputy Ruler of Dubai, UAE Minister of Finance, President of Dubai Health Authority, and the patron of the Award, as an appreciation of all his contribution and support to the medical community, locally, regionally and internationally.

 

This was announced during the press conference held yesterday at the Palace Hotel, on the occasion of the launch of the quarterly Hamdan Medical Journal, in the presence of media, the members of the Award's Board of Trustees, the members of the Award's Scientific Committees, officials of UAE Ministry of Health and health authorities, doctors and health care professionals, and students of the UAE medical colleges.

 

Also, the Award honored Prof. Yousuf Abdul Razzaq, Editor-in-Chief of Journal of  Medical Sciences, as one of the leading UAE scientists who have been working with the Award since the beginning, as a member of the General Secretariat and Chairman of the Scientific Committee.

 

 

 

Prof. Yousuf was the Editor-In-Chief of Journal of Medical Sciences. He made sure that the journal stood strongly on its feet on very solid ground. Accordingly, the way has been paved for launching Hamdan Medical Journal, which is expected to be one of the most important medical periodicals in the world. 

 

At the beginning of the press conference, Prof. Najib Al Khaja, Secretary General of Hamdan Medical Award and Founding Editor of HMJ, delivered a speech, during which he conveyed the greetings of H.H. Sheikh Hamdan Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Deputy Ruler of Dubai, UAE Minister of Finance, President of Dubai Health Authority, and patron of the Award.

 

"The launch of Hamdan Medical Journal has crowned the efforts exerted by the Award, since its establishment in 1999 and so far, in supporting the medical community through honoring scientists, and enhancing medical research and Continuing Medical Education", Prof. Najuib said. 

 

"The Journal represents the medical community, locally and regionally, and goes in line with the revolution in communication. The world has become a small village and knowledge has become available at hand", he added. 

 

"A year and a half ago, we invited a group of local and international experts in the field of medical journals for a 2-day workshop.  In that, these experts evaluated our journal and compared it with other journals.  They identified the strengths and weakness of the journal and gave us all the available options to go ahead and develop a suitable journal for the Awards and the region.  That workshop was extremely successful and useful.  It demonstrated to us the latest in the world of publication, the new technologies in the field and the evolution occurring there. Since then, we decided to follow the recommendation and to give a new blood of life to the journal" Al Khaja said.

 

Subsequently, Prof. Harald Rosen, Editor-in-chief of HMJ, spoke about the important role played by the specialized medical journals in supporting continuing medical education for physicians and researchers through keeping them up with the speed of state-of-the-art of medicine.

 

"As we were lucky to persuade some of Europe's and the US leading experts to provide us with key note reviews to the present state-of-the-art of diagnosis and treatment of this leading health problem worldwide we feel that we were able to produce an attractive "starting issue" for our readers", Prof. Rosen said.

 

"HMJ will take the great opportunity to serve as a new platform to help health care professional to improve their standard of care through using the World Wide Web as an additional platform to the standardized method of "paper publication, focusing on main topics of general interest per issue in addition to the "traditional" original research papers, providing readers with comments and analysis of important recent publications in the medical literature as well as during scientific conferences and serving as a platform for publications of original clinical as well as experimental research for researchers of the Gulf region as well as from abroad", Prof. Rosen said.

 

Then, the website of Hamdan Medical Journal was inaugurated. Mrs Pippa Smart, Publishing Consultant of the Journal, said that the website of the journal is published open access - there is no restriction on accessing the articles and no subscription required.

 

"To ensure the quality of what the HMJ publishes, we operate an external peer review system. The editors select specialists to review submitted articles to check the quality of what is written and to identify any problems in the research or the presentation of results. This allows the editors to make decisions based on quality external advice - and provides authors will useful feedback on how to improve their articles before publication", she added.

 

"Hamdan Medical journal adheres to the strictest international guidelines on ethical research and publication. The Journal is a member of the International Committee on Publication Ethics and a signatory to research reporting guidelines such as CONSORT, which provides guidance on the reporting of clinical trials. The authors are required to conform to these standards ", she added. 

 

"To ensure that the journal not only presents content but also encourages discussion, we have made it easy for readers to communicate directly with authors and to enter discussions around the published articles. The journal provides a "one-click" emailing service. To facilitate public discussion we have a simple system that allows readers to Comment and respond to articles - the comments appear under the articles", She added.

"Hamdan Medical journal provides unique online identifiers (called Digital Object Identifiers) for articles. By using these and embedding online links, the journal is able to provide seamless linking from the articles to the articles that they cite. This allows readers to follow a trail of research - from article to article to article", she added.

 

"The web site provides search mechanisms that readers can use to find similar content on other trusted biomedical and health websites. Also, a "related content" link is provided by each article allows readers to discover other articles published by HMJ that may be useful to them", she added.

 

The journal provides careful editing of the submitted articles, and we also allow authors to retain copyright ownership. By allowing authors to retain copyright ownership in their articles they are not restricted in how they can re-use their content and we believe that this respects the rights of the authors. Hamdan Medical Award has also taken the decision not to charge authors a publication fee - as are charged by many other open access journals. This policy has been introduced as part of the Award's objective of ensuring that there are no barriers to the publication and access of research", she said.