This past year was our busiest year yet at NAPGO. In 2024, we grew partnerships with conferences throughout the United States, published the most manuscripts we ever have in a year, increased our website traffic significantly, and started our journey to PMC. Our journey to PMC has included starting a companion journal to house the great abstracts that we publish from various academic conferences. Our new companion journal, North American Proceedings in Gynecology and Obstetrics - Supplemental, will be up and running in January of 2024. NAPGO-S will only publish abstracts from various conferences; while NAPGO will publish only original manuscripts and conference bulletins/compendiums.
So why do we partner with academic conferences? We noticed that the larger publishing houses stopped publishing abstracts from most conferences (other than ones that they put on directly) and when they did publish abstracts, they stopped issuing DOIs. While PMC does not index DOIs (which is why we started NAPGO-S), other indices like Google Scholar and Crossref do index abstract DOIs. Therefore, we offer authors from our academic conference partners something that other publishers do not, siteable and indexed abstracts. It all started with the Midwest Reproductive Symposium international conference (MRSi) in 2022. From there we grew to work with the American College of Osteopathic Obstetrics and Gynecology (ACOOG), and in 2024 we began to work with the the Central Association of Obstricians and Gynecologists (CAOG), who has been in existence for almost a century. Our intention is to amplify the work from the conferences with our open access format and also to encourage authors who present at these conferences to submit their complete manuscripts to NAPGO for full publication.
While we continue to publish abstracts in NAPGO-S, going forward NAPGO will only be original research, expert reviews, systematic reviews, and case reports. This move is being made to come into line with the scope of PMC, which we hope to submit to in 2025. NAPGO needs two things, more submissions and more reviewers. Our goal is to publish 20 manuscripts in the first 6 months of 2025. If you have a completed paper that is sitting on your desk or an abstract with a rough manuscript, now is the time to act and submit to NAPGO. We are an open access journal that does charge a publication fee but our rates are far below large publishing houses. We charge between $300-$700 for manuscripts and if you have reviewed for us, your next publication fee will be discounted $100 - that’s right you will be compensated to review in our journal! Skip that trip to Costco and get your article published.
If you have published with us before you may have noticed a change to our typesetting. To improve our indexing and search hits we changed from PDF format to XML. This also puts us into compliance with PMC. We even have our abstracts set in XML so that they will be flagged when searched for in Google Scholar. Every measure we take going forward will prepare us for Pubmed and improve the visibility of our author’s work.
So what is next for NAPGO? We have three goals for 2025:
- Increase the volume both in submissions and reviewers
- Partner with one or two additional conferences to expand our reach
- Gain admission to PMC
We hope that you will come along in this journey with NAPGO to build an academic community through publication and the open access distribution of knowledge.
Rocco Rossi, MD
Editor-in-Chief
North American Proceedings in Gynecology and Obstetrics