Advancing a Global Vision.

Since the journal's inception, Global Advances in Health and Medicine has sought to highlight global health issues and perspectives through a lens that includes a focus on integrative health and medicine. In an article published in Lancet, Koplan et al call for a common definition of global health.[1] Distinguishing the differences between international health (focuses on health issues of countries other than one's own) and public health (focuses on issues that affect the health of the population of a particular country), they define global health as follows:

Global health is an area for study, research and practice that places priority on improving health and achieving equity in health for all people worldwide. Global health emphasizes transnational health issues, determinants, and solutions; involves many disciplines within and beyond the health sciences and promotes interdisciplinary collaboration; and is a synthesis of population-based prevention with individual-level clinical care.[1]

As co–editors-in-chief of Global Advances in Health and Medicine, we endorse this definition and believe that GAHMJ is making an important contribution to the field through our focus on whole-person and whole-systems care and healing and a vision that aspires to improve health and wellbeing worldwide. In a recent editorial, Margaret Winker and the president of the World Association of Medical Editors, Dr Louis Ferris, call upon health journal editors to promote global health by publishing, whenever possible, research that furthers health worldwide.[2] Noting that published research is a global public good, among a comprehensive list of recommendations, they call upon editors to

publish research that addresses the greatest global health concerns;

encourage the publication of innovative and solution-focused research in all fields of health and medicine, in particular, research applicable to lowand middle-income countries;

encourage the publication of research from authors in low- and middle-income countries; and

invite researchers from low- and middle-income countries to participate on editorial boards and serve as peer reviewers and to contribute editorials and commentaries.

We endorse the premise advanced by Winker and Ferris that editors have a social responsibility to promote global health by both publishing and creating access to literature that advances health and wellbeing worldwide.