2006 - 10th Anniversary
May 31, 2006
Dear OJIN Readers,
It is my pleasure as Editor of OJIN to invite you to join the OJIN Staff in celebrating the journal’s 10th Anniversary. I trust you already noticed our new OJIN anniversary masthead and the new name of the journal, OJIN: The Online Journal of Issues in Nursing, which can now be officially referenced as simply OJIN.
OJIN was birthed in the excitement of the early Internet days when the ‘sky,’ rather than limiting OJIN’s possibilities, enhanced them. No one was less prepared for the success of this new journal, christened the Online Journal of Issues in Nursing, than the Kent State University nursing faculty who started it. As OJIN staff, we had no idea how fast the journal would grow or what a big undertaking it would be to produce the journal.
Our goals were lofty -- to use the Internet to create a place where nurses from around the world could dialogue about current issues affecting our professional lives in a manner that would bring all aspects of these issues into focus. We wanted to provide a peer-reviewed journal that would make a difference for nurses, patients, and the profession, at no charge to readers.
We knew we would need authors; technical help; insight into nursing’s current issues, defined as questions for which there are not clear right or wrong answers, but rather differences of opinion; and a variety of journal sections to bring forth the various important considerations of each issue.
We found potential authors among the leading experts on topics relevant to nursing professionals, and technical help at the American Nurses Association (ANA) when Susan Jones, OJIN’s first editor and her colleague, Judy Huntington, then ANA Director of Strategic Planning, created "the marriage made in cyberspace." Linda Thede, OJIN’s first Production Manager, used her technical expertise to prepare the content for posting and teach the OJIN staff about online publishing. Today NursingWorld remains the home for OJIN, and the ANA Online Services Department provides the technical skill to post and maintain the journal.
Current issues touching the professional lives of nurses were, and still are, identified by the OJIN staff, composed of nursing faculty at Kent State University who remain active in nursing, by readers who share their ideas for cutting-edge topics with our staff, and by Judy Huntington, who remains actively involved with the journal as an advisory board member.
Where are we now, on our 10th Anniversary? We have indeed maximized the power of the Internet to enable nurses around the world to dialogue about nursing issues, through the articles, letters to the editor, responses to the letters, and subsequent articles. The Nursing Shortage and the Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) topics have received record numbers of letters to the editor and responses. This dialogue has been markedly enhanced by OJIN’s participation in Medscape Publisher’s Circle, which last year opened a special discussion board focused on the four OJIN DNP articles featured on Medscape. One of these articles was Medscape Nurses’ 11th most read article. Contributing to OJIN dialogues are authors who live on all continents, Antarctica excepted, and letter writers from around the world. One of our articles has already been translated into Chinese and reprinted in a professional journal.
Authors from a variety of professional areas, including among others, information management and medical records specialists, attorneys and criminologists, legislators and policy analysts, and physicians and public health experts, have increased our ability to analyze issues pertinent to nursing professionals from many perspectives.
Our primary goal was for the journal, with its now 30 topics, to make a difference in the lives of nurses, patients and the profession. Topics such as Nurse Safety and the Endangered Health System have brought marked attention to the need for improving the working environment of nurses. The Cultural Diversity and Patient Safety topics have highlighted what we need to do to provide safer, more sensitive care for our patients; while the Continuing Competence and Collaboration topics have taught us how to increase nursing’s credibility with interdisciplinary team members and the public.
No one has been less prepared for OJIN’s tremendous success than the staff who gave it life. The journal is now opened, electronically, more than 100,000 times per month, and this number continues to increase. Readers grow professionally both through reading the articles and through our Continuing Education offerings which now average 1,223 users per offering.
In closing we give you a hearty thanks for making OJIN a tremendous success! Without our wonderful authors, letter writers, and readers, OJIN would not be celebrating its 10th anniversary! Keep those manuscripts, letters, compliments, and ideas coming! Thanks, also, to our Editorial Review Board Members (link) for their insights, which have made the OJIN articles so strong, and to our Advisory Board members (link) for their encouragement and creative ideas. Special thanks to the ANA Online Services Team: Karen Coale, Larry Himelfarb, Nancy Bellegrade, Patrice Franklin, and Christine Zhou, for going the extra mile, so patiently and so kindly, and without whom the OJIN manuscripts might still be lying on my desk.
Sincerely,
Harriet Coeling, Editor, and the OJIN Staff