JCHIMP - an idea whose time has come.

With this issue, we complete Volume 6 of the Journal of Community Hospital Internal Medicine Perspectives (JCHIMP). Volume 6 #6 is the 29th issue over the last 6 years, having published 366 manuscripts. The journal was initially conceived at the Association of Program Directors in Internal Medicine (APDIM) semi-annual meeting in Minneapolis during the Community Hospital Assembly in 2010. The founder and editor was and is Robert Ferguson from Baltimore. The first issue of the journal was published in 2011; the lead article was titled the ‘Origins of JCHIMP’ (1). Our start-up was very strongly supported by David Solomon of Michigan State University who has been a leader in medical electronic publishing for many years (2). David helped us get organized with our great publisher, Co-Action Publishing in Stockholm, Sweden. Anne Bindslev, Lena Wistrand, and Caroline Sutton have provided the expertise at that end. APDIM support has remained strong as Richard Alweis, co-chair of the Community Hospital Assembly and APDIM Councilor later became associate editor and board member.

Finance

We are largely a voluntary staff. Jen Huff is the administrative person in the office at Greater Baltimore Medical Center (GBMC) in Baltimore, MD, where the journal has been based since Dr. Ferguson's transfer from Medstar to GBMC in 2013. The journal was PubMed indexed in 2014, retroactive to our first issue in 2011. We do not provide commercial advertising, so we are dependent on publication fees and to a lesser extent on sponsorships and donations. We have significant sponsorship commitments currently from GBMC, Reading Health System (West Reading, PA), University of Maryland School of Medicine Alumni Association, American College of Physicians (ACP) Maryland Chapter and our most recent addition, Rochester Regional Health (Rochester, NY). As you might suspect, then, finance is always an issue. We do our best to use our resources wisely. We felt compelled to increase our publication fee from $500 a manuscript to $600 in 2016 (note: there are no fees if the paper isn't published). Happily, this fee remains less than many other open access journals, and we have seen no sign of an adverse effect as our number of submissions continue on an upward slope. We pledge to reduce publication fees if we manage to secure more sponsorships and donations.

So how are we doing?

Our journal continues its rapid growth in partnership with our publisher, Co-Action Publishing. At the forefront of this relationship is Caroline Sutton, who serves as the point person with our sponsors and tracks our traffic data for the editorial board. We are very enthusiastic of the continuous progress of JCHIMP. In 2016, our manuscript publication total exceeds 100 (Table 1). The sources of these manuscripts came from 48 institutions in 13 states and 3 foreign countries (Table 2). Unique individual numbers are equally impressive (Fig. 1). In a typical month, 2,500–3,000 new readers are introduced to the journal. After the end of Volume 1, we had about 2,400 unique individuals; 5 years later, it exceeds 100,000 (Table 2). Through the end of August this year, we had already seen 157,999 full-text views of articles published in the journal. Last year, this total was 182,059, so we should easily exceed our 2015 readership. In 2015, our website usage showed 33,753 sessions, 25,325 unique users, and over 90,000 page views. As of the end of August, we had already exceeded all of those numbers. The journal reaches 169 countries, but the United States accounts for 56% of our visitors. This large volume of usage has numerous benefits for our sponsoring organizations, as their ‘brands’ are present on every page/page view of the journal, their initiatives are celebrated on our social media platform, and their residents and faculty get published in a PubMed-indexed journal. The internal medicine residency at Reading Health System (and the health system, in general) gained visibility from their sponsorship, and this was particularly useful for resident recruitment. In fact, the benefits were so protean that Dr. Alweis’ new organization, Rochester Regional Health, has decided to sponsor the journal, as well.

Table 1

This table shows the number of manuscripts published and issues per year

Year	No. of manuscripts	No. of issues per year
2011	31	4
2012	41	4
2013	30	3 (due to Hiatus)
2014	60	5
2015	96	6
2016	108	6

Table 2

Institutions published in JCHIMP in 2016

Abington Jefferson Health (PA)	Norwalk (CT)
Advocate Illinois Masonic Medical Center (IL)	Reading Health (PA)
Bridgeport Hospital (CT)	Rochester Regional (NY)
Brooklyn Hospital Center, NY	Saint Mary Mercy (MI)
Buffalo Sisters of Charity Hospital (NY)	San Antonia (Italy)
Chattanooga (TN)	San Joaquin (CA)
Cleveland Clinic (FL)	Saudi Arabia
Easton (PA)	Scripps UCSD (CA)
Elmhurst (NY)	Sinai (M)D
GBMC (MD)	St Agnes Hospital (MD)
Geisinger (PA)	St. Elizabeth (NY)
Good Shepherd (TX)	St. Frances (IL)
Guthrie (PA)	St. Francis (NJ)
Icahn School of Medicine (NY)	St. John Providence (MI)
Interfaith (NY)	St. Joseph Hospital (NJ)
Lincoln Medical Center (NY)	St. Luke's (NY)
John T. Mather Memorial Hospital (NY)	St. Vincent (MA)
Lankenau (PA)	University Alabama, Birmingham (AL)
Leumit Health (Israel)	University of Hawaii (HI)
Med Star Franklin Square (MD)	University of Illinois, Peoria (IL)
Med Star Union Memorial (MD)	University of Pittsburgh (PA)
Mt. Sinai Hospital (IL)	University of Tennessee, Memphis (TN)
Montefiore New Rochelle (NY)	Wellspan York (PA)
New York University (NY)	West Suburban (IL)

Fig. 1

Cumulative unique visitors.

The journal staff pride themselves in JCHIMP's functionality. A typical publication is 3–5 months from initial submission. At JCHIMP, the submissions and reviews at GBMC are handled by Jen Huff. The functionality in Sweden is assured by Anne Bindslev and Caroline Sutton. The Chimp Editorial Board meets quarterly. Peer review is at the heart of a peer-reviewed journal. We once again have had a stellar group who have done a great job in 2016 (Table 3).

Table 3

JCHIMP peer reviewers 2016

Brian Aboff	Robert Ferguson	Phillip Mackowiak	Manzoor Rather
Khalid Abusaada	Laurel Fick	Srinivasa Madhavan	Sofiya Rehman
Carlos Acuna	Kevin Fleming	Naba Mainali	Namita Ruhela
Amesh Adalja	Yacov Fogelman	Srikrishna Malayala	Mohsen Saadat
Amitesh Agarwal	Scott Forman	Mohammad Malik	Sanah Sadiq
Manyoo Agarwal	Paul Foster	Jayaprakash Manda	Yazan Samhouri
Hassan Alkawam	Joseph Fuscaldo	Henry Meilman	Fardad Sarabchi
Ahmed Al-khazraji	Ibrahim Ghobrial	Marita Mike	Prabin Sharma
Richard Alweis	Sunil Goyal	Hmu Minn	Ankita Shashidhar
Priya Angi	Gaurav Gulati	Robabeh(Ruby)Mohammadzadeh	Chirag Sheth
Nobuhiro Ariyoshi	Shanu Gupta	Mahsa Mohebtash	Mansur Shomali
Donna Astiz	Hafeez Hassan Virk	Harsha Moole	Nazia Siddiqui
Raja Ayash	Farnaz Houshmand	Nargiz Muganlinskaya	Peter Sloane
Hooman Bakhshi	Duosha Hu	Marc Mugmon	David Smith
Sandeep Banga	Reza Imani	Swaroopa Nalamalapu	Jeffrey Stroup
Talha Bashir	Syung Min Jung	Salik Nazir	Bishnu Subedi
Prashanthi Baskaran	Alan Kaell	Binh Nguyen	Daniel Summers
Ewelina Biskup	Yugandhar Kandimalla	James Nguyen	Thein Swe
Yvonne Braver	Paras Karmacharya	Fnu Nutan	Kshitij Thakur
Wayne Campbell	Joel Katz	Vikram Oke	Joel Thekekara
Yuanning Cao	Maryam Keshtkarjahromi	Abdillahi Omar	Linda Thomas
Lucien Cardinal	Ramesh Khurana	Ali Ozhand	Michael Tofano
Issam Cheikh	Victor Kolade	Venkataraman Palabindala	Nitin Trivedi
Malek Cheikh	Kiran K Kommaraju	Phil Panzarella	Liubou Uslar
Chester Choi	Robert Kornberg	Kinnari Parikh	Hakim Uqdah
Dobbin Chow	Mahesh Krishnamurthy	Jimmy Pham	Yue Wang
Francis Christian	Claudia Kroker-Bode	Amareshwar Podugu	David Weisman
John Cmar	Sapna Kuehl	Richard PomerantZ	David Widlus
Ricardo Conti	Amit Kulkarni	Dilli Poudel	Radhika Vij
Stefan David	Alexandre Lacasse	Khalid Qazi	Frederick Williams
Janaki Deepak	Ankush Lahoti	Nazia Qazi	Neil Vyas
Zhijun Du	May Lee	Celeste Quianzon	Manajyoti Yadav
Emmanuel Elueze	John Logan	Shweta Ramsahai	Jessica Young
Vamsi Emani	Richard Loynd	Ashish Rana

New things in 2016 and 2017

There were a few changes this year. We stopped doing Editor's Notes with every issue and we moved the publication dates for our summer issues to July and September. Board meetings became quarterly, and Alwin Steinmann, former APDIM president, became a board member. The fourth active sponsor, the University of Maryland School of Medicine Alumni Association, joined the sponsors, emphasizing the inclusiveness of the journal's agenda. All constituencies are welcome. The Alumni Association plans to support three publications a year on the history of medicine. The first appeared in the last issue in October on Emerging Infectious Diseases of the 1970s. In 2017, our fifth active sponsor, Rochester Regional Health, joins the team. Another new series will start in 2017, when we plan to publish abstracts from The Associates competition held annually under the auspices of the Maryland ACP Chapter. We are hopeful for expanded activities in additional areas currently being considered. Co-Action Publishing has been acquired by Taylor & Francis Group which will lead to an update in the publishing portfolio. The layout style of Taylor & Francis includes ‘Interact’ which is fully optimized for online browsing while maintaining the high quality required for print.

Adapting the words of Victor Hugo, the idea of community-based, non-profit, peer-reviewed, PubMed-indexed scholarly internal medicine journal read worldwide appears to be an idea whose time has come. Of course, the journal's success is completely dependent on you, our readers, authors, and reviewers. So, thank YOU for your continued support as we move into our seventh year.