Launching GHU Open: A Global, Open-Access Platform for Health Sciences Research

Abstract

Health sciences research stands at an inflection point. The volume of evidence generated each year now exceeds the capacity of any single clinician, educator, or policy maker to assimilate.¹ At the same time, access barriers, fragmented dissemination, and inconsistent reporting continue to limit how rapidly that evidence reaches the patients, practitioners, and communities who need it.²,³ Against this backdrop, we are delighted to introduce GHU Open, a new international peer-reviewed open-access journal dedicated to the broad health sciences. GHU Open is published by Global Healthcare Umbrella Publishing as a fully open-access platform under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license.² From day one, every article we publish will be freely accessible to readers anywhere in the world, with authors retaining copyright over their work. Article processing charges are waived throughout 2026 as part of our commitment to lowering financial barriers during the journal's inaugural year.

Our Scope and Vision

GHU Open welcomes original research across the full range of the health sciences—internal medicine and surgery, public health and epidemiology, nursing and allied health professions, pharmacy and clinical therapeutics, dentistry, rehabilitation and sports medicine, mental health, health policy, medical education, and the rapidly evolving fields of digital health, telemedicine, and artificial intelligence in healthcare. We are particularly interested in interdisciplinary work, translational research that bridges laboratory and clinic, and studies with clear implications for practice or policy. Our editorial vision rests on three commitments. First, we believe that clinical and public health evidence must be both rigorous and accessible. Methodological rigor, adherence to established reporting guidelines—including CONSORT for randomized trials,⁴ STROBE for observational studies,⁵ PRISMA for systematic reviews,⁶ CARE for case reports,⁷ and ARRIVE for animal research⁸—and transparent reporting of methods and data are non-negotiable. So is plain, accurate writing that allows clinicians and policymakers—not only specialists in a narrow subfield—to understand and apply our work. Second, we believe that authors deserve a peer review process that is timely, constructive, and transparent. GHU Open commits to a first editorial decision within thirty-five days of submission, supported by a double-blind peer review process. We see peer review not as an adversarial filter but as a developmental conversation that improves the work for everyone—authors, reviewers, and readers alike. Third, we believe that the future of evidence in health care is interdisciplinary, digital, and global. We have built our editorial workflows around contemporary standards: ORCID identification for all corresponding authors, mandatory disclosure of artificial intelligence tool use in line with ICMJE and AMA guidance,⁹,¹⁰ structured data availability statements, and a commitment to depositing published metadata with Crossref to ensure long-term discoverability and citation.

What Sets GHU Open Apart

Several features distinguish GHU Open from other entrants in the open-access landscape. We provide pre-formatted manuscript templates aligned with established reporting guidelines for each article type. Authors can download a CONSORT-aligned template for randomized trials,⁴ a STROBE-aligned template for observational studies,⁵ a PRISMA template for systematic reviews,⁶ a CARE template for case reports,⁷ and dedicated templates for narrative reviews, short communications, and editorials. By embedding the structural expectations of each guideline directly into the writing environment, we aim to reduce the friction of compliance and free authors to focus on their science. We follow the AMA Manual of Style, 11th Edition,¹⁰ as our editorial standard. This choice reflects the journal's primary orientation toward clinical and biomedical readers, and provides authors with a single consistent reference for citation, nomenclature, statistical reporting, and unit usage. We require transparent disclosure of AI tool use. Generative artificial intelligence is changing how research is conducted, analyzed, and written; pretending otherwise is no longer credible.⁹ GHU Open will neither prohibit AI assistance nor permit it to be hidden. Authors must declare what tools were used, for what purpose, and confirm that they—not the model—are accountable for the accuracy and integrity of every claim, citation, and figure. We are deliberate about ethical foundations. Studies involving human participants must be approved by an institutional review board and conform to the Declaration of Helsinki.¹¹ Clinical trials must be prospectively registered in a WHO ICTRP-recognized registry. Systematic reviews must be registered with PROSPERO or an equivalent platform. Authorship must meet all four ICMJE criteria,¹ and individual contributions must be specified using the CRediT taxonomy.¹²

This Inaugural Issue

The articles in this inaugural issue reflect the breadth we hope to publish in the years ahead. We are grateful to the authors who entrusted their work to a new journal before its reputation was made, and to the colleagues whose invited contributions help establish what we mean by GHU Open in practice. We are also indebted to the early members of our editorial board, whose names and affiliations are listed on the journal's website. They have given generously of their expertise to set the editorial direction described above, and they will continue to shape the journal as it grows.

An Invitation

GHU Open is, in its first months, a small journal with large ambitions. We invite researchers across the health sciences—established and emerging, in well-resourced and under-resourced settings alike—to submit their best work. We invite reviewers to join our reviewer pool and help us deliver on the thirty-five-day decision commitment. We invite readers to engage with the work we publish, to challenge it, to build on it, and to share it widely. The evidence base for human health is the collective product of the global health sciences community.³ GHU Open is one small new venue through which that evidence can move from researcher to reader without paywalls, without delay, and without distortion. We look forward to the work to come.