AME Medical Journal: burnishing AME dream

AME Publishing Company, with the three letters interpreting Academic Made Easy, Excellent and Enthusiastic, is now publishing 25 English journals, among which 2 have been indexed by Science Citation Index (SCI), and 15 by PubMed. Except Hong Kong, we have offices in Guangzhou, Changsha, Nanjing, and Shanghai for now, and more cities including Beijing, Sydney and San Francisco in the process of setting up.

I founded AME in July 2009. After 14 months, two journals, Journal of Thoracic Disease (December 2009) and Journal of Gastrointestinal Oncology (September 2010), were published. I was so certain at that time that I would focus on running of these two journals only and make them excellent. However, it was only perspective of mine before I met Mr. Stanley (Tiantian) Li, founder of DXY.cn.

Stanley and I had a similar experience: we both gave up being a doctor after the medical education and founded our own companies. In November 21, 2010, we finally met in Guangzhou. We had a very pleasant conversation during the simple snack in Café de Coral near Nanfang Hospital. I told Stanley that I had published two journals and I was going to contribute my lifetime into them. “NEJM is prestigious for sure, but I have 2 to made excellent”, confidently I said. “How about make the number bigger? Instead of 2 or 3, how about make it hundreds?” Stanley replied to me with these enlightening words. I never thought about it but I knew I should do it and was incapable of doing it. Because of this very meeting, Stanley lit up my dream on one hand and on the other hand brought about the angel investment towards AME from DXY in early 2011.

Five years later in August 23, 2016, AME secured US$4 million in series A round of funding. What we have been exploring besides publishing academic journals during the past 5 years is book publishing. Seventeen English books (e.g., Lung Cancer), 15 Chinese books (e.g., Laparoscopic Gastrointestinal Surgery Notes) as well as 60 English-Chinese e-books have been published for now. What’s more, in order to better organize and promote the journals and books, we held more than 100 offline academic events in a variety of forms.

We summarize as CNS of what we have done.

• C for Content: Content is the King. We collect and deposit professional, extraordinary and up-to-date content in form of journals, books etc.).
• N for Network: Through organizing, editing, publishing and promoting medical journals and books, we built an extensive and collaborative network that connects Chinese and foreign doctors with expertise in different disciplines including internal medicine, surgery, pathology, etc.).
• S for System: We intend to build an innovative and pleasant ecosystem to facilitate scientific research. For instance, we developed a system that connects our journal editors with reviewers. Journal editors would release academic manuscripts on the system, qualified reviewers would initiate the review process by signing up for a certain article of their interest, and gain the “quick coin”, a virtual reward in the system with which one can pay for the article proceeding fee or products like journals or books. Besides applying peer review process in the system, we also move the translation tasks to the system and it is running very well. Normally, the tasks would be snapped up by our registered members within 48 hours after the release.

It is one of the events that I met Dr. Yaxing Shen with whom AME journey extends. It is one of the dozens of AME academic Salons we held in 2013.

The salon was held at the Affiliated Hospital of Nantong University on Dec 7, 2013. The attendees are doctors of different disciplines from different cities nearby. One of them is Dr. Yaxing Shen, a young and promising thoracic surgeon from Zhongshan Hospital of Fudan University, Shanghai. After the salon, he proposed a tea party in his hotel room to continue the pleasant but unsatisfied salon. After we stepped out of the elevator, which located at the center of the hotel with rooms circled around, we kept turning left and kept walking in the aisle which seemed endless, and finally reached his room. The rest of us felt a bit lost and suddenly noticed that Yaxing’s room is right at the right side of the elevator! Being amazed, we all laughed out loud. “Typical surgeon!” Yaxing teased himself. Exactly, surgeons are being trained hand-to-hand by their mentors whom also be called as “Masters”, with precise procedures not allowing any tiny mistakes and what they do is to follow and keep practicing till perfect before one is about to make a difference.

The tea party was my first and impressive meeting with Dr. Shen where a spark flared. Since then we regularly find time to meet and talk, exchanging ideas we have. I would say if Stanley is the one light up my dreams, then Yaxing is the one adds flames on it.

We share the common perception on medical education and “AME College” is a result from it. There is also a decent Chinese name, Yishu, named by Yaxing, giving multiple meanings. In the first year, medical training programs was designed and carried out in a dozen of cities across China, with wisdom and practice being shared in an easy and humorous way by experienced experts, mostly in medical writing, statistics and tools of research design (Figure 1). The project was incredibly well received, owe to this group of like-minded friends. Lately, “Board of AME College” was formed and the first board meeting was held in Ji’nan, August 28, 2016, on a boat we rented to increase a sense of ceremony (Figure 2).

Figure 1 AME College’s medical training programs was designed and carried out in a dozen of cities across China.

Figure 2 The delegates of Board of AME College attended the first board meeting in Ji’nan.

During the first board meeting, we decided to launch a new journal—AME Medical Journal—as the official publication of AME College. Dr. Shen was recommended as the first Editor-in-Chief of the journal. AME Medical Journal would definitely burnish my “making it hundreds” dream, which I am confident to achieve within the next five years as a rapid development term for AME with all the support we have.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Nancy Zhong for her language editing of the editorial.

Funding: None.

Footnote

Provenance and Peer Review: This article was commissioned by the editorial office, AME Medical Journal. The article did not undergo external peer review.

Conflicts of Interest: The author has completed the ICMJE uniform disclosure form (available at http://dx.doi.org/10.21037amj.2016.10.01). The paper was commissioned by the editorial office without any funding or sponsorship. The author reports that he is the Founder and CEO of AME publishing company (publisher of the journal). The author has no other conflicts of interest to declare.

Ethical statement: The author is accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.

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