Dear readers and authors!
Best wishes for a Happy New Year and a Merry Christmas! I understand that the past 2020 was not easy for all of us, and the circumstances of force majeure significantly changed the lives of many of us. They also changed the fate of our journal. Unfortunately, in 2020 “History of medicine. The Russian journal” (English and Russian versions) was not published due to objective financial and organizational reasons. Moreover, the challenges we faced seemed insurmountable. The situation was so hopeless that I even had to notify many of you about the closure of the journal.
All this was especially bitter for me, because, according to the results of 2019, the rating of our journal turned out to be truly brilliant: we were literally one point short of the second quartile (Q2)! Let me remind you of the fact that “History of medicine. The Russian journal” (in Russian «История медицины») is the only Russian scientific journal in its field, which is completely published in two languages – English and Russian. In private correspondence or in person many of you ask me about what is reflected in Scopus? I would like to clarify: the Scopus database of scientific periodicals and citations includes precisely “History of medicine. The Russian journal” – full English version. Over the years, the editorial board and I, as the editor-in-chief, have managed to achieve almost impossible things: we have ensured such a high level of our English-language content that in Scopus our journal is represented only by the full-text English version. Modern science is global and this global science has a language. Today it is English. By publishing their articles only in Russian and mistakenly believing that in this way they support Russian science, Russian scientists drop out of the global scientific space and, unfortunately, over the years, move away from it more and more. This circumstance especially saddened me in connection with the overdue decision last year to close the journal. It was even more insulting that our journal lacked only one percentile until Q2. This is despite the fact that in 2014 we started from the obvious zero, and at the beginning of 2018 were somewhere in the middle of the fourth quartile. This is a huge success that all the members of the editorial board and authors of our journal should share with me!
Thus, at the end of 2020, the situation seemed to us completely hopeless. However, today I am addressing you with a joyful announcement:
the journal is preserved and will continue to be published!
We have to thank our colleagues from “Elsevier”, one of the largest publishing houses that oversees Scopus. They are very friendly to the concerns of those who today, in addition to the struggle for existence, also solve the problems of development, and such, especially in Russia, becomes less and less.
The journal will continue to be published by its founder, the Non-profit Charitable Organization the Classical Research Foundation, and will be published on a special schedule. We have received permission to release fewer issues than usual in 2021, while allowing for significant variation in the format of the publication. In due time, I will announce when the issues for 2021 will be released, how many there will be and how many articles will be included in each of them. However, I am already glad to invite authors to send their articles, and also assure scientists who have already sent us their articles that they will certainly be published – of course, after passing the necessary review procedures and a positive decision of the editorial board about the publication.
I wish you a Happy New Year and wonderful news that will help our scientific research to become part of the global scientific space.
Sincerely yours,
