Annual Review of Public Health

The Annual Review of Public Health published its first volume in 1980, in response to a second American "public health revolution". The preface of the first volume noted the shift towards chronic health conditions like cancer and heart disease. It also noted the rising cost of diagnosing and treating disease in the US, which had doubled from 1950 to 1975.[2] The first editor was American physician Lester Breslow.[3] Initially, the journal was organized into five subtopics, age and disease-specific public health, behavioral aspects of health, environmental health, epidemiology/biostatistics, and health services. In Volume 13 (1992), a sixth subtopic was added: public health practice.[4] The five subtopics in Volume 15 (1994) were epidemiology and biostatistics, public health practice, behavioral aspects of health, health services, and environmental and occupational health.[5] In April 2017, Annual Reviews made the Annual Review of Public Health open access as part of a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. By May 2019, usage of the journal had increased eight-fold relative to 2016 to about 200,000 downloads monthly. For comparison, the titles for clinical psychology and medicine that maintained gated access showed no change in usage. Additionally, the audience for the journal increased from 1,100 institutions in 57 countries (2016) to 7,220 institutions in 137 countries (2018).[6] Based on the success of the Annual Review of Public Health, Annual Reviews created "Subscribe to Open" (S2O) publishing model to convert some of its other journals from gated to open access on a year-to-year basis.[7]

The Annual Review of Public Health is helmed by the editor. The editor is assisted by the editorial committee, which includes associate editors, regular members, and occasionally guest editors. Guest members participate at the invitation of the editor, and serve terms of one year. All other members of the editorial committee are appointed by the Annual Reviews board of directors and serve five-year terms. The editorial committee determines which topics should be included in each volume and solicits reviews from qualified authors.[8] Unsolicited manuscripts are not accepted. Peer review of accepted manuscripts is undertaken by the editorial committee.[9]