New Open-Access Journal Aims to Turn Disaster Research Into Life-Saving Action

A new scholarly publication has entered the crowded landscape of medical journals with a deliberately ambitious mission: to make sure that the science of saving lives in emergencies and disasters actually reaches the people who need it, when they need it. The Journal of Emergency and Disaster Medicine, inaugurated under the auspices of the Kasr Al-Ainy Faculty of Medicine at Cairo University, is a fully open-access journal published with Springer Nature. Its founding editorial, written by Abdel Meguid Kassem and Husam Salah Mourad of Kasr Al-Ainy Faculty of Medicine and published on 11 December 2025 as the first article of the journal’s inaugural volume, lays out a vision shaped by the conviction that emergencies and disasters must be managed through an evidence-based, structured, and multidisciplinary framework rather than through improvisation alone.

The timing and the geography of this launch matter. The editors describe their belief as rooted in cumulative experience gained in a continent and a region they characterize as plagued by both natural and man-made disasters. North Africa, the Middle East, and the wider African continent have contended in recent decades with earthquakes, floods, conflicts, displacement crises, and public health emergencies that place enormous strain on health systems. In such settings, the editors argue, sharing field experience must go hand in hand with rigorous methodology, because anecdote without evidence rarely changes outcomes, and evidence locked behind paywalls rarely reaches the clinicians and officials working in low-resource or crisis-affected environments.

The problem the new journal identifies is a familiar one in global health research: a persistent disconnect between what is published and what is practiced. The founding editorial notes that on a global level, from sudden natural catastrophes to complex humanitarian emergencies, timely and reliable information has repeatedly proven critical, yet researchers, practitioners, and policymakers are often caught by surprise and struggle to access up-to-date findings precisely where the stakes are highest. Disaster-prone and crisis-affected regions frequently lack institutional subscriptions to major journals, meaning that the communities with the most direct experience of mass casualties, infrastructure collapse, and emergency response are often the least able to read the literature about them. The Journal of Emergency and Disaster Medicine is explicitly designed to fill that gap.

Open access sits at the center of that design. The editors state plainly that in many settings where emergencies strike, budgets are tight and institutional subscriptions may be out of reach, so all articles in the journal will be freely accessible to readers worldwide. They frame this as a matter of principle rather than mere convenience, holding that scientific progress and clinical excellence should serve humanity without restriction. The journal is published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution, and reproduction in any medium or format, provided the original authors and source are credited and changes are indicated. For frontline workers in humanitarian operations, that licensing model means research can be downloaded, printed, translated, and circulated in the field without negotiating copyright barriers in the middle of a crisis.

The journal’s scope is broad by design, reflecting the reality that disaster medicine is not a narrow specialty but a systems-level discipline. The editors invite contributions spanning all dimensions of acute and disaster-related care, including prehospital and emergency department medicine, trauma systems, disaster risk reduction, mass casualty response, humanitarian health services, public health emergencies, and the use of technology and innovation in crisis contexts. That breadth mirrors the way disasters actually unfold: a single earthquake engages ambulance dispatch protocols, emergency department triage, surgical capacity, water and sanitation systems, disease surveillance, and long-term rehabilitation of survivors, all at once. A journal that addresses any one of those domains in isolation risks missing the interdependencies that determine how many people survive.

Notably, the editors are not limiting the journal to conventional research formats. Alongside original research, reviews, and policy analyses, they explicitly encourage field reports and case studies that reflect real-world challenges and innovations. This is a methodologically significant choice. Much of the practical knowledge in disaster response exists as institutional memory in the heads of emergency physicians, logisticians, and humanitarian coordinators, and it often evaporates when operations end. Formalizing a venue for such accounts, subject to the same editorial scrutiny as traditional papers, could help convert hard-won field experience into a reusable, citable body of knowledge. The editors emphasize that their focus is on work that not only advances theoretical knowledge but also produces actionable strategies for preparedness, response, and recovery.

Quality control will rest with an Editorial Board that the editors describe as a body of experts drawn from different corners of the world, a composition intended to position the publication as an efficient tool in the prevention and management of emergencies and disasters. Submitted manuscripts will be evaluated by independent reviewers for originality, methodological soundness, clarity, and relevance, the standard pillars of peer review. The journal’s publication workflow is designed to minimize the delay between acceptance and public availability: once a manuscript is accepted, it will be published online immediately after professional copyediting and typesetting. In a field where outbreak dynamics, aftershocks, and mass casualty events move faster than traditional publication cycles, that speed of dissemination is presented as a core feature rather than an afterthought.

The institutional provenance of the journal adds a distinctive dimension. Kasr Al-Ainy Faculty of Medicine, founded in the nineteenth century, is one of the oldest and largest medical schools in Africa and the Middle East, and Cairo University’s teaching hospital complex functions as a major referral center for Egypt. Its emergency departments absorb an enormous and varied caseload, from road traffic trauma to the aftermath of regional emergencies, giving the institution direct operational familiarity with the challenges the journal addresses. A publication anchored in a high-volume, resource-constrained health system, rather than in a wealthy institution insulated from such pressures, has the potential to set different priorities: questions about triage under scarcity, surge capacity, and supply chain resilience are not hypothetical there.

The launch also arrives amid growing international attention to health emergency preparedness. The COVID-19 pandemic, alongside repeated climate-linked disasters and ongoing conflicts, has exposed weaknesses in how evidence flows to decision-makers during crises, and global frameworks for disaster risk reduction have called for stronger science-to-policy linkages. A journal dedicated to converting evidence into actionable strategies speaks directly to that agenda, and its open-access model lowers the barrier for contributions from researchers in low- and middle-income countries, who are frequently underrepresented in high-impact emergency medicine literature.

The founding editorial closes with an invitation rather than a declaration of arrival. Kassem and Mourad write that they envision the Journal of Emergency and Disaster Medicine becoming a go-to reference for clinicians, researchers, humanitarian professionals, and policymakers committed to saving lives under difficult conditions, and they look forward to submissions, critiques, and shared experience as the venture begins. The editorial, published as Volume 1, article number 1 of the journal, is itself open access, and the first issue will reveal whether the publication can attract the rigorous field research and policy work its founders describe. What is already clear is the editorial wager behind it: that in emergencies and disasters, the distance between evidence and action is measured in lives, and that shortening that distance begins with making the evidence universally available.

Subject of Research: The launch of an open-access journal on emergency and disaster medicine

Article Title: From evidence to action: The launch of the Journal of Emergency and Disaster Medicine by Kasr Al-Ainy Faculty of Medicine, Cairo University

Article References: From evidence to action: The launch of the Journal of Emergency and Disaster Medicine by Kasr Al-Ainy Faculty of Medicine, Cairo University. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s44467-025-00005-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44467-025-00005-6

Keywords: emergency medicine, disaster medicine, open access, Cairo University, Kasr Al-Ainy, mass casualty response, humanitarian health, public health emergencies, trauma systems, disaster risk reduction, editorial, Springer Nature