A new health informatics journal, JHIDC - The Journal of Health Informatics in Developing Countries, has been launched. It both covers a gap in the market and provides challenges, through its open access model, to many existing health and medical informatics journals.

Thanks to my colleague Chris Paton, from New Zealand, for the post on his Health Informatics Blog about this new journal.

The Journal of Health Informatics in Developing Countries (JHIDC) is a newly-launched, international peer-reviewed journal. Its editorial base is at the University of Otago in New Zealand, but the editorial board (currently) features members from New Zealand, Pakistan, South Africa and Tanzania. The primary focus relates to health informatics in developing countries, with articles undergoing peer review, and a promised quick turn-around on the review process.

Importantly, as far as I am concerned, it not only addresses a set of issues that have been poorly addressed by much of the international health and medical informatics communities, but it is an open access journal, with a policy of "immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge." JHIDC is not the first open access health informatics journal; others exist, most notably JMIR, but by using this approach, which is essential if the international health informatics community is to truly fulfil some of its long-promised goals of developing health informatics globally, it will hopefully provide further impetus to push other providers to more open access to their materials.

JHIDC uses ,Open Journal Systems (OJS), a journal management and publishing system that has been developed by the Public Knowledge Project.