Producing a scientific journal in a small scientific community: an author-helpful policy.

Most scientific information is published in a small number of prestigious journals that address mainstream science [4]. At the same time, developing countries encompass almost a quarter of the world’s scientists but only less than 6% of research spending [4]. Journals from this “scientific periphery” [10] are poorly visible in the scientific community: the Science Citation Index (SCI), one of the most prestigious bibliographic databases, included less than 2% of journals in developing countries in 1995 [4]. We have previously described the vicious cycle of inadequacy for small journals from small scientific communities [4]: due to the small number and poor quality of manuscripts submitted, inadequate review process, and imperfect English, these journals cannot reach sufficient high visibility to attract better-quality reports and a broader readership, to become indexed, and thus to eventually escape from the shadow of anonymity [10]. We have also described our experience at the Croatian Medical Journal (CMJ) with breaking out of this vicious cycle [8,11,15,17]. During our work with Croatian authors during the war years from 1991 to 1995 [9,12,14], we developed an author-helpful editorial policya procedure with which most of the articles received were pre-reviewed intramurally and improved before being sent out for extramural review [11,14,17]. This scheme of work evolved naturally from our everyday practice, because our authors were mostly inexperienced scientists and writers, unaware of the importance of publishing and lacking the knowledge and technology for research planning. Thus, we had to embark on teaching not only scientific writing but also research planning, as well as data analysis and interpretation [13]. By taking on the role of educators, teaching both authors and undergraduate and postgraduate students how to write a scientific paper, we have helped them to produce and publish articles not only in the CMJ but also in many other international journals [8,14]. Such a policy has resulted in an enormous burden to the journal’s personnel, but also in a significant formal successthe inclusion of the CMJ in the most selective international indexing databases (MEDLINE in 1998, and Current