There’s a new outlet available for researchers to get out your work on physical activity and healthy eating! The Journal of Healthy Eating Active Living is an international, online, open-access, quarterly, peer-reviewed journal focused on publishing high-quality studies in the areas of active living and healthy eating. JHEAL is now accepting papers for its inaugural issue, to be published in the Fall of 2020. You can visit the journal website for instructions and more information.
JHEAL’s Editor-in-Chief, Dr. Jay Maddock of Texas A&M/Department of Environmental and Occupational Health, notes the journal was born out of discussions at the 2020 Active Living Conference: “Many of us had been attending [ALC] for two decades and we never had a single journal where all of the work was captured. Another watershed moment was a paper that my doctoral student submitted to a physical activity journal on bike-share. Even though 6,000 people rode the bikes during the first six weeks of implementation, it was desk rejected because it didn’t have a physical activity outcome. We realized then that we need a journal that specifically captures the interdisciplinary outcomes of policy and environmental change on eating and activity.”
Studies of the relationship between active living and/or healthy eating and environment – social, cultural, economic, political, natural, virtual, and built – are especially welcome. The founding philosophy includes the application of research to practice, and JHEAL invites practice and policy-oriented submissions from practitioners, policymakers, and advocates as well as researchers. Research and practice/policy papers will have separate sections.
Formats include reports, brief communications, meta-analyses, scoping reviews, translational and practice-based research, policy and systems change evaluations, natural experiment studies, case studies, notes from the field, commentaries, and systematic reviews. Quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods studies are all encouraged. The journal staff is also open to publishing digital media files including maps, visualizations, and other modern media. And what’s a journal without reviewers? The journal invites applications for membership on the review board. Email your CV and research areas, plus a list of your research interests, to JHEALeditor@profpubs.com . Going forward, reviewers who have reviewed a paper in the past year will receive 10% off their Article Processing Fee (APF). The discount is cumulative up to 30%, so reviewers of multiple papers can stack discounts. Dr. Maddock notes they are actively recruiting practitioners to serve as peer reviewers.
