I follow the aging literature using (among other tools) a set of RSS feeds that monitors recent journal articles in PubMed.

Today, my feeds were all overflowing, and with great titles, way more than usual…and then I noticed that all of the papers seemed to be from the same journal.

What’s going on? PubMed has started indexing AGING, the open-access biogerontology journal that launched a little less than a year ago, and several issues at once were added to the database (and, therefore, to my feeds). This was announced last year but it’s taken a while for the full catalog of articles to make it into the database.

Getting indexed is an important step for a new publishing effort, since if an article isn’t in PubMed it’s basically invisible to scholars around the world. So, congratulations are in order.

Looking over the last year of AGING, I’m reasonably impressed. For such a new journal, they’re getting lots of papers from major labs, and publishing quite a few nice studies. This bodes well for measures of importance such as impact factor and article-level metrics (though neither is yet available for AGING).

The great thing about open-access journals is that content is free to everyone — so if the lack of journal subscriptions has been holding you back, now is a great time to jump into the aging literature. AGING is highly technical, but it represents a rare confluence of universal accessibility and a high concentration of aging-related articles, so it’s a good place to start exploring.