About Harm Reduction Journal

What is Harm Reduction Journal?

Harm Reduction Journal is an Open Access, peer-reviewed, online journal whose focus is on the prevalent patterns of psychoactive drug use, the public policies meant to control them, and the search for effective methods of reducing the adverse medical, public health, and social consequences associated with both drugs and drug policies. We define 'harm reduction' as 'policies and programs which aim to reduce the health, social, and economic costs of legal and illegal psychoactive drug use without necessarily reducing drug consumption'.

We are especially interested in studies of the evolving patterns of drug use around the world, their implications for the spread of HIV/AIDS and other blood-borne pathogens, and in accurate descriptions and rigorous evaluations of innovative policies and practices for harm reduction in diverse societies. HRJ also seeks to improve the access to authoritative and current harm reduction literature for health professionals and policy specialists in the non-English speaking world, by offering access to translations of published articles, and their data sets.

While there are many fine print journals already published on the drug issue, the Open Access journal HRJ is the first to focus exclusively on this public health model and to make contemporary research on harm reduction freely available online - as well as providing full access to the large body of factual reports and policy documents published by governments and by the growing international network of harm reduction organizations.

Content overview

Harm Reduction Journal considers the following types of articles:

• Research - reports of data from original research.
• Book reviews - 1000-1500 words on recent and classic works in the field.
• Brief reports - brief reports of data from original research, usually about 1500 words.
• Case reports - reports of clinical cases that can be educational, describe a diagnostic or therapeutic dilemma, suggest an association, or present an important adverse reaction.
• Case studies - descriptions of a major healthcare intervention, usually from a public health perspective. The article should include a rigorous assessment of the processes and impact of the intervention as well as recommendations for future interventions
• Commentaries - short, focused and opinionated articles on any subject within the journal's scope. These articles are usually related to a contemporary issue, such as recent research findings or other HRJ publications.
• Methodology articles - present a new experimental method, test or procedure. The method described may either be completely new, or may offer a better version of an existing method. The article must describe a demonstrable advance on what is currently available.
• Reviews - comprehensive, authoritative descriptions of important subjects within the journal's scope. HRJ will regularly solicit these and is open to proposals for additional topics. These have an educational aim and are 2000-5000 words - with more extensive and wider ranging references.

Peer review policies

• Peer review in Harm Reduction Journal (HRJ) is designed to ensure that the research and scholarship published is based on sound principles of science and is relevant to the important issues associated with drug use and drug policies.
• HRJ considers manuscripts spanning a wide range of scientific, public health, and policy interests.
• We recognize the importance of highlighting articles that contain the most interesting, important or significant research. Peer reviewers are asked to indicate articles they consider to be especially interesting or significant. These articles will be given greater prominence within HRJ and greater external publicity.
• Submitted manuscripts will generally be reviewed by two external experts.
• Peer reviewers will have four possible options, for each manuscript:
• accept without revision
• accept after revision without expecting to check those revisions
• neither accept nor reject until author(s) make revisions and resubmit
• reject because scientifically unsound
• In recommending whether to accept or reject a manuscript, a reviewer asks him/herself whether the scientific community is better served by publishing or not publishing the article. The final decision to publish rests with the Editors.
• When asking for revisions, reviewers have two possible goals: to ask authors to tighten their arguments based on existing data or to identify areas where more data are needed.
• HRJ normally allows authors a maximum of two revisions of a manuscript.
• Peer reviewers are asked to say if the manuscript is not sufficiently clearly written for publication. In such cases authors are asked to revise the manuscript, seeking, if necessary, the assistance of colleagues or a commercial editing service.
• We aim to publish research as quickly as possible. Our electronic submission process is designed to facilitate rapid publication.

Edited by Ernest Drucker, Harm Reduction Journal is supported by an expert Editorial Board.

Publishing in Harm Reduction Journal

All articles are listed in PubMed immediately upon acceptance (after peer review), and are covered by PubMed Central, Thomson Reuters (ISI), Embase and Current Contents.

Articles in Harm Reduction Journal should be cited in the same way as articles in a traditional journal. However, because articles in this journal are not printed, they do not have page numbers. Instead, they have a unique article number.

The following citation:

Harm Reduct J 2004, 2:1

refers to article 1 from volume 2 of the journal.

As an online journal, Harm Reduction Journal does not have issue numbers. Each volume corresponds to a calendar year.

To keep up to date with the latest articles from Harm Reduction Journal, why not register to receive alerts? Registration also enables you to customise your subject areas of interest, store your searches, and submit your manuscripts.

Submission of manuscripts

Manuscripts should be submitted electronically to Harm Reduction Journal using the online submission system. Full details of how to submit a manuscript are given in the instructions for authors.

General journal policies

Harm Reduction Journal is published by BioMed Central, part of Springer Science+Business Media. BioMed Central is committed to ensuring peer-reviewed biomedical research is open access. That means it is freely and universally accessible online, it is archived in at least one internationally recognised free access repository, and its authors retain copyright, allowing anyone to reproduce or disseminate articles, according to the BioMed Central copyright and licence agreement. Harm Reduction Journal however, has taken this further by making all its content open access.

Harm Reduction Journal's articles are archived in PubMed Central, the US National Library of Medicine's full-text repository of life science literature, and also at INIST in France and in e-Depot, the National Library of the Netherlands' digital archive of all electronic publications. The journal is also participating in the British Library's e-journals pilot project, and plans to deposit copies of all articles with the British Library.

BioMed Central is working closely with Thomson Reuters (ISI) to ensure that citation analysis of articles published in Harm Reduction Journal will be available.

Harm Reduction Journal is able to deliver summaries of frequently updated content via Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds. These are accessible via the orange "XML" button at the top of the list of recent articles or the list of most accessed articles. For more information about RSS feeds see our publisher's website.

For further information about general policies please see the instructions for authors.