Two years ago, in the editorial of the Medical Journal of Indonesia (MJI) No. 1 Volume 23 (2014) I wrote about the year of transition. The main transition at that time was a great change of MJI working system from conventional fto webbased system with Open Journal System (OJS), from paper based to paper less system. Everyone, including the authors, editors, reviewers, secretary staffs, should adapt to the new system. These changes were unavoidable to harmonize our path with international system. And this is in line with the target of MJI to be indexed in an international indexing company.
Indeed, on December 2015 we received announcement from Scopus stating that our journal was accepted to be indexed in the Scopus. For us in Indonesia, this indexation means that the MJI is acknowledged as an international journal by the Indonesian Ministry of Education and Research.
As has been predicted, the change of this status will certainly be followed by significant “shock” perceived by all editorial team as submission of articles to MJI will be enormous. And indeed, now we receive article submission in 2016 that almost double that of the last year.
On the one hand, these changes give us the possibility to increase the quality of our journal, since more selected articles are available. On the other hand, we have to make much greater efforts since numerous article should be published in each edition, or alternatively we should increase the frequency of yearly publication. It never close the possibility that both, the increase in frequency and number of articles have to be done. On the author point of view, it means heavier competition to be published in MJI, since more articles will be subjected to rejection from the first or subsequent round of review process.
In order to cope with all these changes, the management system of MJI undoubtedly should change, by making adaptations in many aspects of our work. In response to this situation, the Dean of the Faculty of Medicine, Universitas Indonesia has appointed dr. Agus Rizal Hamid, a potential man power, to reinforce our editorial team. In the first time, he will take the position as deputy chief editor for giving him sufficient time to adapt with MJI’s working environment. And in long run he will be projected as editor-in-chief. Of course significant restructuration should be implemented by recruiting more editorial board members and administrative staffs, along with regular training for capacity building. Financial, equipment, and other facilities should be made available.
We hope that dr. Agus Rizal Hamid will bring great innovations for the better future of MJI. Hopefully, this will give good impacts for Indonesian researchers and will heighten the rank of the Faculty of Medicine Universitas Indonesia amongst research universities in the world.