Editorial

This long-awaited edition of JASAM marks a long-awaited transformation of the society’s journal. Up until now JASAM has been a somewhat insular journal mostly distributed amongst society members. The Australasian region, and indeed the ASAM membership, however, has a wealth of expertise to offer the international aviation medicine community and as the incoming journal editor it was my view that JASAM should be a vehicle by which society members are able to have their expertise shared with the wider scientific community.

JASAM has also in the past struggled to receive enough papers to publish an annual edition, for reasons including those above. It was accordingly therefore also my view that the journal should be open for contributions from the wider scientific community.

The move in modern medical publishing is away from the traditional model of paid journal access to a more open, free access to research. The ASMA ‘blue journal” – Aerospace Medicine and Human Performance – traditionally the go to journal for aerospace medicine – still remains a pay-for journal unless one has ASMA membership. There is a place therefore for an open access publication in the arena of aerospace medicine, and JASAM is ideally placed to fill that void.

Hence from this edition, JASAM is now an open access, online only journal, and we are working towards indexing with a number of sources including Pubmed.

In this edition we publish student essays from our previous ASAM conference scholarship winners who have now with the passage of time gone on to bigger and better things. We have contributors from our members in clinical aviation medicine, and original research from across the ocean

There are a number of fantastic papers waiting in the wings to be reviewed and published. As the journal is now online, we are not constrained by having to wait for a healthy population of papers to publish and will open the journal volume each year and publish as we receive new contributions and they go through the normal peer review process.

As have the previous editors, I urge and encourage members, and the wider aviation medicine community to consider putting together for publication interesting case studies, review articles and original research, particularly from our members who are working at the coal face and are seeing interesting clinical problems in aeromedical decision making.

I also wish to thank our peer reviewers for this volume and beyond for your much appreciated work in reviewing the submitted material. I also encourage members or readers who have particular interest in reviewing papers in the future to contact me – you will be welcomed enthusiastically!

I hope you enjoy the new format and the papers we have for you now. Please visit the journal website at Exeley publishing to register to alert you for future content.

Dr David Fitzgeraldeditor@asam.org.au