About The Lancet Digital Health

About the journal

The Lancet Digital Health, a new gold Open Access journal, building on The Lancet’s tradition as an advocate for health. This monthly journal is committed to publishing high-quality original research, comment, and correspondence contributing to promoting digital technologies in health practice worldwide. By bringing together the most important advances in this multidisciplinary field, The Lancet Digital Health aspires to be the most prominent publishing venue in digital health.

The Lancet Digital Health publishes important, innovative, and practice-changing research on any topic connected with digital technology in clinical medicine, public health, and global health. We serve the digital health, clinical, and wider health communities by promoting high-quality science and supporting the ethical use of technologies and data in practice. The Lancet Digital Health’s content crosses subject boundaries, building bridges between health professionals and researchers.

The journal is indexed in the Journal Citation Reports® Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI), the DOAJ and Scopus.

Information for Authors

In keeping with other Lancet journals, The Lancet Digital Health offers rapid publication of research online within 8–12 weeks from submission. Wherever possible, figures and good quality photographs should be used to supplement and to enhance the text. We also welcome videos. All original research is subjected to the Lancet family of journals’ usual rigorous standards of external clinical and statistical peer review, and edited by experienced technical copy editors to the highest standards.

Manuscripts must be solely the work of the author(s) stated, must not have been previously published elsewhere, and must not be under consideration by another journal. The Lancet journals are signatories of the Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals, issued by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE Recommendations), and to the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) code of conduct for editors. We follow COPE's guidelines.

We also welcome pre-submission enquiries. To find out more please contact [email protected].

Article processing charges

No subscription or pay-per-view charges apply to any content published in The Lancet Digital Health. In order to cover the costs of reviewing, copy editing, layout, and online hosting and archiving, the journal charges an article processing fee of $5000 upon acceptance of submitted research articles,reviews and viewpoint articles (no fee applies to Comment or Correspondence).

Authors whose main funder is located either in group A or B countries of the Health Inter Network Access to Research Initiative (HINARI) or in a country with a low UNDP human development index will be exempt from payment. For authors with no formal funding, the country of origin of the majority of authors' institutions will be taken as the source country. If there is no majority country, the corresponding author's country will be so designated.

The editorial decision to accept is taken well before any request is made as to the ability to pay. Payments are processed by a department unconnected to The Lancet Digital Health's editorial department.

Copyright and reuse

All content is published under Creative Commons licensing, which enables authors to retain copyright while allowing others to copy, distribute, and make some uses of their work, provided full credit is given to them as originators. Authors will be offered a choice of two licences (CC BY or CC BY-NC-ND) depending on whether or not they wish to allow commercial reuse of their work and whether or not they wish to allow others to alter their work in the course of its reuse. Authors will be asked to sign an exclusive licence (or non-exclusive licence for government employees) to permit our publisher, Elsevier, to publish the work in The Lancet Digital Health.

Publishing excellence

As trusted sources of information, the Lancet journals set extremely high standards for publishing, and we are committed to ensuring that our editorial processes meet our standards of excellence. From acceptance of your paper through to publication and beyond, our in-house teams of professional Editors, Assistant Editor, Illustrators, Production Editors, and Marketing and Communications experts can provide personal attention and guidance to strengthen the accuracy, accessibility, timeliness, and impact of your research.

Rupa Sarkar, Editor-in-Chief
Rupa is the founding Editor-in-Chief of The Lancet Digital Health since December, 2018. Rupa obtained her PhD from Imperial College London, where she investigated the role of microRNAs and RNA splicing in human stem cell differentiation under the guidance of Dr Nick Dibb and Prof Robert Winston. After her postdoctoral research in embryonic development and disease at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Rupa joined Nature Research as an Associate Editor at Nature Protocols. She then progressed to Senior Editor at Genome Biology leading the disease genomics area of the journal. Prior to her appointment at The Lancet Digital Health, Rupa was the Chief Editor of Nature Protocols, leading the journal’s editorial team. Her interests span all interdisciplinary areas of digital health, with a particular interest in genomics and artificial intelligence approaches in clinical application.

For enquires about The Lancet Digital Health, contact Rupa at [email protected]

Diana Samuel, Senior Editor
Diana joined The Lancet Digital Health as a Senior Editor in January 2020. Diana completed a PhD in Biomechanics at the University of Glasgow, studying tree frog adhesion. This was followed by a postdoc based at both the University of Kent and the University of Antwerp, where she investigated bonobo hand pressures. Prior to joining The Lancet Digital Health, she was an Associate Editor at BMC Medicine. Her interests include the development and testing of medical apps, research involving electronic health records, and advancements in data security.

For enquires about The Lancet Digital Health, contact Diana at [email protected]

Ombudsman

Our ombudsman can: investigate delays in handling submitted manuscripts; discourtesy; failure to follow outlined procedures; failure to take reasonable account of representations to us by authors and readers; and challenges to the publishing ethics of the journal. If you have concerns about any of the above, please first contact an editor or the editorial inbox [email protected]; an editor will then respond to you (often, an editor can respond satisfactorily). If you remain dissatisfied with our response, please contact Malcolm Molyneux ([email protected])

Read more about the ombudsman and see our ombudsman's reports.

November 2020

Volume 2, Issue 11