The Journal’s beginnings and its raison d’être

The journal Revista de Osteoporosis y Metabolismo Mineral (ROMM) is the scientific publication of the Spanish Society of Bone Research and Mineral Metabolism (SEIOMM, from its original Spanish title). Its creation was agreed on during the XIII SEIOMM Congress held in Oviedo in 2008. Until then, the Society journal was the Spanish Journal of Bone Metabolic Diseases, which had been founded in 1993 by Dr. Aurelio Rapado Errazti and presented at the SEIOMM Congress held in Córdoba, Spain. Known as REEMO, this belonged to the Elsevier publishing company, then Doyma, directed by Dr. Rapado. This journal had an uneven output during its existence. Its best stage was when Dr. Rapado did his utmost to ensure that each issue’s content was mostly original material. In its last years, after the sad disappearance of Dr. Rapado, the REEMO decreased both in the number of pages and in the interest that it engendered from the scientific point of view. In 2008, the conditions imposed unilaterally by Doyma-Elsevier on SEIOMM to continue with its cooperation were deemed unacceptable by SEIOMM. In the General Meeting at Oviedo, it was agreed to terminate the current contract with this publisher and create a new publication, owned by the SEIOMM, which is the ROMM.

The first point of debate raised at that gathering was whether or not the SEIOMM needed to have a scientific journal. The Assembly agreed, by a considerable majority, to create the current Journal, financed by SEIOMM.

From its inception, ROMM’s editorial board established the need to publish a journal with quality articles, editorials and relevant reviews. To this end, standards uniformly accepted by the most prestigious journals, such as those developed in Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals ¹ or the ethical principles on publications: Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) ², were accepted from the beginning, including anonymous peer review of the manuscripts submitted, requesting the cooperation of researchers and authors of recognized prestige in the field of bone mineral metabolism. The SEIOMM board of directors at that time, of which we were part director and editor, in its policy of support for the Journal, considered it necessary to establish a strategy for claiming original articles through the research works awarded by the SEIOMM and FEIOMM. This strategy has been maintained by subsequent boards of directors.

The road to wide dissemination. The major databases and repositories

Our first objective was to achieve maximum diffusion and visibility for the Journal. To this end, we have requested its inclusion in all existing databases and repositories. One fact that has facilitated this work has been the completely free nature of the Journal, both to published articles (no amount is charged to authors, whether or not members of the SEIOMM) and to be able to access them through its website ³ in full text and in both languages, Spanish and English, with no embargo period.

In some databases, the lesser ones, our Journal’s inclusion was simple, requiring only a request form. In others, an assessment was compulsory by their respective expert committees, a process that sometimes took months, with often varied requirements. The truth is that, once the process started and after the inclusion of the ROMM in the first 5 databases, each new acceptance not only increased the number, but acted as a facilitating factor in the following database.

The inclusion in the SciELO database and repository marked the turning point in the publication of the Journal. For this, we had to request it twice, needing to adapt some characteristics and requirements in order to achieve uniformity. The SciELO platform is clearly involved in the DOAJ (Digital Open Access Journals) ⁴ movement and as a result of this collaboration we have been included in its database, as well as being able to obtain the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) of the articles of our Journal, having jointly signed a collaboration document, published in this same issue, the Declaration of Sant Joan d'Alacant ⁵.

Currently, the ROMM is included in 26 databases and repositories and we have requested inclusion in at least 2 more. Among them, several very important, such as SciELO, Scopus, Web of Science, DOAJ, ERIHPLUS and Google Scholar. The inclusion in Scopus will make it possible to attain an impact factor for the first time, although it will be facilitated by Elsevier in the form of Cite Score and Scimago Journal Rank (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Journal of Osteoporosis and Mineral Metabolism: its presence in Scopus 

Having a presence in virtually all databases, with the exception of Medline, we have some objective and external data that inform our publication’s quality. Thus, in 2015, the "H index" (system proposed by Jorge Hirsch, of the University of California, to measure researchers’ professional quality) of the Spanish scientific journals according to Google Scholar or Academic was published. Over the period of 2010-2014, the ROMM attained a ranking of 63 ⁶ with an index H of 7 and a median H of 9. The same authors repeated the study including the year 2015, then observed a decrease of the ROMM to position 87, with the same values of index H and of its median ⁷. Given that the H index is calculated based on the distribution of the citations received by a researcher’s scientific works, we conclude that the main problem the ROMM now has is that its articles are rarely cited, even by its own authors ⁸.

However, analyzing other bibliometric indexes that assess the quality of journals, regardless of the number of citations of their articles, the University of Barcelona has developed an application called Information Matrix for the Analysis of Journals (MIAR). Based on different data, it calculates each year the ICDS (Composite Index of Secondary Diffusion), which is an indicator that shows the visibility of a journal in different scientific databases of international scope, or, failing that, in evaluation repertoires of periodicals ⁹. An elevated ICDS means that the journal is present in different sources of information of international relevance. In its latest update, of 2018, the ROMM obtained an ICDS of 9.5 points, out of a possible maximum of 11, having increased this index year after year, as in 2016 it was 9.3 and in 2017, 9.4 ¹⁰. Table 1 shows some ICDS from journals related to bone mineral metabolism, for comparison.

Table 1 ICDS of some journals in 2017, according to MIAR [^9,10] 

The future of the ROMM: Where are we going? Is there life beyond Medline?

The main objective of ROMM’s management and editorial team and SEIOMM’s board of directors is its inclusion in the Medline database. In the last 5 years, we have twice requested its expert committee’s evaluation, having obtained in 2014 a score of 2.5 and in 2017, 2.7 points, with 3 points being necessary on a maximum of 5 to pass the cut-off threshold and be included. We have carefully analyzed the report (which was presented at the SEIOMM Assembly last October) and we are working to correct everything that can be improved to try again as soon as possible, which will be from May 2019. One of the aspects that we have worked on lately is to improve the Journal web page and adapt it to the editing formats required by some databases. Profound changes in the computer program were carried out.

Another aspect that we must improve is the H index in Google Scholar and the Cite Score in Scopus. To attain this, the articles published in the ROMM must be cited in other journals, preferably those that are indexed in the Journal of Citation Reports, in other words, those that have an impact factor. To encourage the authors and achieve this goal, the current SEIOMM board of directors, in agreement with the journal’s editorial team, has established the "Support to the SEIOMM Magazine" award sponsored by Rubió Laboratories ¹¹.

Now, what would happen if the inclusion of the ROMM in Medline was delayed for a few years? This scenario, although undesirable, is possible. The criteria applied by the Medline Committee of Experts are sometimes difficult to understand and therefore correct. In our opinion, the ROMM is already included in multiple databases and repositories that ensure its visibility. On the other hand, we also have an external recognition with objective data on its quality ^{6 7 8 9-10}. However, the inclusion in Medline is still one of our goals and we will strive to achieve it.

As a conclusion, the SEIOMM has a Contrast Quality Journal that in a relatively short period of time has been widely disseminated (especially in the countries of Central and South America), but which requires the collaboration and involvement of researchers, and in a very special way those that are associated with the SEIOMM, because it is their Journal, which must be materialized by submitting quality articles and citing the Journal’s contents in other scientific publications with an impact factor.