What You Should Know
- The Deal: Wolters Kluwer Health has officially renewed and expanded its publishing relationship with the American Heart Association (AHA).
- The Portfolio Addition: Wolters Kluwer will now publish the Open Access journal Stroke: Vascular and Interventional Neurology, bringing the total number of AHA journal titles under its management to twelve. This sits alongside flagship publications like Circulation and Stroke.
- The Platform: The AHA titles will be featured within Wolters Kluwer’s prestigious Lippincott portfolio, a massive distribution engine that includes nearly 400 indexed medical and scientific titles.
- The Strategy (Open Access): The expanded partnership specifically focuses on balancing traditional subscription models with the growing demand for Open Access publishing, ensuring that critical cardiovascular and brain health research is accessible to a wider global audience of clinicians and policymakers without paywall friction.
- The Leadership Perspective: Both organizations explicitly cited the need for “trust” in an increasingly noisy, saturated digital information landscape. Rigorous, peer-reviewed evidence is being prioritized as the ultimate antidote to medical misinformation.
The Open Access Imperative
Wolters Kluwer Health announced it is renewing and expanding its publishing relationship with the American Heart Association (AHA). The deal brings the AHA’s total footprint within Wolters Kluwer’s Lippincott portfolio to twelve titles, most notably adding the Open Access journal Stroke: Vascular and Interventional Neurology alongside heavyweights like Circulation and Stroke.
Historically, elite medical research was locked behind expensive institutional subscriptions. While that model protected revenue, it inherently limited the speed at which life-saving data could reach frontline clinicians, especially in under-resourced or international settings. By expanding their OA footprint, the AHA and Wolters Kluwer are acknowledging that the ultimate metric of a medical journal isn’t just prestige—it is global impact and accessibility.
“Providing a publishing platform for clinicians and researchers in the U.S. and around the world allows the Association to drive scientific breakthroughs that improve patient care,” said Mariell Jessup. M.D., Chief Science and Medical Officer for the AHA. She emphasized that the goal is to “maximize the availability and visibility of research advances and engage and empower the global and national healthcare ecosystems.”
