Colombia Medica: A Decade of Transformation and Growth

Abstract

As Editor-in-Chief of Colombia Médica, Professor Mauricio Palacios Gómez has led a sustained process of editorial, technical, and scientific strengthening for more than a decade in one of the most influential biomedical journals in Latin America. Through timely, strategically structured, and conceptually solid editorials, he has charted a path of critical reflection and global projection on the role of scientific journals in contexts of academic, technological, and political transition. One of his most recent contributions,”The Art of Validating Science: Four Centuries of Peer Review”, clearly and elegantly synthesizes the historical trajectory of peer review and analyzes current challenges regarding quality, transparency, and equity in scientific publishing. This editorial continues a line of thought initiated a decade earlier with”Agreement to Build Better Scientific Journals in Colombia”, which represented a clear institutional stance by endorsing the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), advocating for a fairer and more qualitative way of evaluating scientific output. In”How to Organize Scientific and Technological Information in Latin America?”, published in 2016, Professor Palacios proposed an integrative regional vision that emphasizes collaborative networks and open science as pillars of a new knowledge infrastructure. In 2018, his editorial, “The Uncertainty of Colombian Scientific Journals with Publindex,” issued a critical warning about systemic weaknesses in the national indexing model and became a key text for understanding the sustainability challenges faced by Colombian scientific journals. A year later, in” Editorial Advances of the Journal Colombia Médica”, he documented the journal’s evolution, including its digital transformation, growing international visibility, and consolidation as a regional benchmark in public health, clinical medicine, and biomedical sciences. In” What does Colombia require to earn a Nobel Prize in Medicine?”, he offered a reflective critique of the excessive use of bibliometric indicators. He advocated for more balanced and contextualized scientific evaluations.