Tenth Anniversary of The IJOEM.

January 2020 marks the 10th anniversary of The IJOEM —a platinum, open-access, peer-reviewed quarterly medical journal. Ten years ago, a group of dedicated people launched a new journal to publish articles on occupational and environmental medicine with a focus on regional problems.[1] This group has since been supported by a remarkable international Editorial Board—four of whom are renown journal editors, themselves.

Over the years, the visibility of the Journal has been increased by being included in MEDLINE,[2] Scopus, EMBASE, Web of Knowledge, and Web of Science, among other indexing systems, and by the increasing number of submissions from various parts of the world. Soon after we stopped publishing the printed version of the Journal,[3] in January 2019, we began to archive all the Journal's contents in PubMed Central (PMC), the free, full-text repository of biomedical and life sciences journals maintained by the US National Library of Medicine.[4] Most articles are already available on PMC; the remaining will be available within next few months. The Journal's contents are also freely available immediately after publication at www.theijoem.com or www.theijoem.org .

In July 2019, the prestigious Directory of Open-Access Journals (DOAJ) awarded the Journal its Seal of Approval, a mark reflecting a high level of openness and adherence to best-practices and high publishing standards. Another success was our implementation of Plan S, which requires “full and immediate open access to peer-reviewed scholarly publications reporting research funded by public and private grants.”[5] In terms of these successes, The IJOEM is second to no other journal in the WHO Eastern Mediterranean Region.[5]

Over the past decade, we have focused more on one of the most important problems facing humanity—global climate change. We have also paid attention to the occupational hazards threatening health care workers and even devoted a theme issue to this subject (January 2014 issue).

The IJOEM is now an online-only journal. We will try our best to use most of the capabilities of online forums—multimedia contents, podcasts, etc. We are now receiving enough submissions each month that we can soon take another step forward—publishing the Journal bimonthly or even continuously, if we can overcome the two important bottlenecks of understaffing and budget cut!

Considering all the limitations we have faced, we nevertheless believe, we will continue to publish a quality journal. This success was only possible because of the full support of the Director of the Petroleum Industry Health Organization, the contributions we receive from authors around the world, the ardent support of our Editorial Board Members, the kind help of the Managing Editors, and the enthusiastic if painstaking work of our Deputy Editor, Dr. Mahboobeh Yadollahie, and our Executive Editor, Ms. Ashraf Simi. I would like to take this opportunity to thank all of them.