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. We are developing a companion website Harm Reduction Journal.org that will augment the published journal (Harm Reduction Journal.com) by enabling us to add translations, blogs, and other material to each article over time. The website will also permit us to make additional contemporary research on harm reduction available online, expand readers’ access to the large body of factual reports and policy documents published by governments, and to keep abreast of the activities of 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.
- 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.
General journal policies
Harm Reduction Journal is published by BioMed Central, an independent publisher 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 license 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 the 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.
If you would like to help raise awareness of Harm Reduction Journal, why not download the journal’s leaflet and poster? You will need Acrobat Reader to open them.
For further information about general policies please see the instructions for authors.