The ranking itself has a relatively short but consequential history. Canada’s Top Growing Companies was launched in 2019 by Report on Business magazine, the business publication of The Globe and Mail, and it evaluates participating firms on a single, transparent metric: percentage growth in annual operating revenue over a three-year period. Because the methodology is uniform across entrants, the list functions less like a subjective award and more like a quantitative snapshot of entrepreneurial momentum across industries. Companies that qualify span technology, professional services, manufacturing, healthcare, and consumer sectors, and the complete roster is published each year in both print and online editions of the magazine. For JMIR Publications, appearing on the 2026 list represents a continuation rather than a debut, as the publisher previously earned a place on the ranking, including the 2023 edition.

Leadership at the company framed the recognition in ideological as well as financial terms. “This recognition proves that independence and open science work,” said Sean Jeong, CEO of JMIR Publications. “Our growth is a direct result of the value we deliver to the scientific community. By keeping research open, transparent, and accessible, we provide a necessary alternative to large commercial publishers.” The statement positions the company’s commercial performance as evidence for a broader argument in scholarly publishing: that a journal portfolio can be financially sustainable while making its articles freely available to readers, rather than placing them behind subscription paywalls or per-article access charges.

That argument matters because the dominant business models in academic publishing have long been contested. Under the traditional subscription model, libraries and institutions pay for access to journals, while researchers typically transfer copyright to publishers in exchange for peer review, editing, typesetting, and distribution. The open access model inverts the revenue structure, shifting costs toward article processing charges paid by authors, their funders, or their institutions, while removing paywalls so that anyone with an internet connection can read the published work. Advocates of open access argue that publicly funded research should be publicly readable, that paywalls slow the diffusion of medical knowledge, and that open licensing enables text mining, reuse, and reproducibility at scale. Critics have historically questioned whether open access journals could match the revenue stability of subscription giants. JMIR Publications’ 105 percent growth figure will be read by many in the field as a data point suggesting that the open access proposition can, under the right conditions, compete effectively.

Founded around the Journal of Medical Internet Research, one of the most prominent peer-reviewed venues in the digital health field, JMIR Publications has built its portfolio specifically around research at the intersection of medicine and technology. This includes mobile health applications, telemedicine, wearable sensors, health informatics, artificial intelligence in clinical settings, and the evaluation of online health interventions. The strategic focus is notable. Digital health has become one of the fastest-moving areas of biomedical inquiry, driven by the proliferation of smartphones capable of running health applications, the maturation of machine learning methods applicable to clinical data, and the policy pressure on health systems to modernize care delivery. A publisher concentrated on this niche is effectively tethered to the growth curve of the field itself, and the company’s leadership argues that this positioning explains its trajectory.

Indeed, the company’s outlook statement links its commercial future to structural trends in research funding. As healthcare systems worldwide accelerate the adoption of digital solutions, investment in research on artificial intelligence, mobile health, and health informatics continues to increase. That expansion generates an unprecedented volume of scientific inquiry, and every new study requires validation, peer review, and dissemination. JMIR Publications says it intends to capture this rising tide by ensuring that breakthroughs in digital health are validated through peer review, published in its journals, and made accessible to the global medical community. In practical terms, the publisher acts as a filter and amplifier: rigorous review screens out weak findings, while open licensing and digital distribution ensure that accepted findings reach clinicians, policymakers, and fellow researchers without delay.

The company was emphatic that the ranking achievement is a collective one, attributing it to the network of people who power its journals. In its announcement, JMIR Publications credited the talent of its staff, the expertise of its editorial board members, and the thousands of authors who entrust the publisher with their research. It extended particular thanks to its peer reviewers, whose unpaid labor remains one of the least visible yet most essential components of the scholarly publishing system. Peer review is the mechanism by which scientific claims are scrutinized before publication, and the willingness of experts to donate their time and judgment underwrites the credibility of every journal, open access or otherwise. By acknowledging reviewers explicitly, the publisher highlighted a dependency that the entire industry shares, even as experimentation with AI-assisted screening and open peer review formats attempts to modernize the process.

The broader market context makes the recognition more than a corporate milestone. The open access movement has gained institutional momentum over the past two decades through funder mandates, institutional policies, and large-scale agreements known as transformative deals, in which consortia of libraries negotiate with publishers to flip subscription expenditures into open publishing fees. Plan S, the coordinated initiative by a coalition of research funders, requires grant-funded outputs to be openly available, and national policies in Europe and elsewhere have pushed in the same direction. Meanwhile, the rise of preprint servers has compressed the timeline between discovery and dissemination, pressuring journals to demonstrate the value they add beyond distribution. Publishers that thrive in this environment are typically those that can pair credible peer review with fast turnaround, modern digital tooling, and genuine visibility for authors. JMIR Publications describes itself as a technology organization with publishing at its core, emphasizing author advocacy, research amplification, and innovative tools that support researchers at every step of the dissemination process.

There is also a distinctly Canadian dimension to the story. The Globe and Mail ranking celebrates entrepreneurial achievement across the country, and a scholarly publisher from Toronto appearing among 377 qualifying firms underscores that knowledge industries, not only resource or consumer sectors, contribute meaningfully to Canadian growth. For the research community, however, the more consequential signal is financial. Open science has often been framed as an ethical imperative whose economics remain unproven at scale; a mid-sized independent publisher doubling its revenue in three years, without the subscription back catalogue or institutional contracts that shelter the largest incumbents, offers a working counterexample. The challenge ahead for JMIR Publications, as for the open access movement generally, is to convert growth into durable infrastructure: sustaining rigorous review, keeping costs transparent, and ensuring that the accelerating output of digital health research reaches the clinicians and patients who ultimately depend on it. On the evidence of the 2026 ranking, the market is currently voting in favor of that model.

Subject of Research: Recognition of open access digital health publisher JMIR Publications in The Globe and Mail's 2026 Canada's Top Growing Companies ranking

Article Title: JMIR publications named one of Canada’s top growing companies by The Globe and Mail for 2026

Article References: JMIR publications named one of Canada’s top growing companies by The Globe and Mail for 2026. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: JMIR Publications, open access publishing, Canada's Top Growing Companies, The Globe and Mail, digital health, scholarly publishing, revenue growth, peer review, Journal of Medical Internet Research, open science, health informatics, artificial intelligence