KAMJE - the Korean Association of Medical Journal Editors - is not a conventional commercial publisher. It is the editors' association that sits behind most of South Korea's academic medical journals: roughly 300 member titles published by individual Korean medical, dental, nursing, nutrition and veterinary societies. Established in Seoul on 22 February 1996 to raise the quality of Korean medical journals, KAMJE today runs the shared infrastructure those journals depend on - the KoreaMed bibliographic index, the KoreaMed Synapse full-text and DOI-linking platform (140,000+ archived articles), and the KOMCI citation index.

For an author, this matters in a practical way: you never submit "to KAMJE." You submit to an individual society journal - the Journal of Korean Medical Science, Yonsei Medical Journal, Korean Journal of Radiology, and so on - and KAMJE membership tells you that the journal follows shared editorial, indexing, and ethics standards. This guide explains how the ecosystem works, what it costs, and how to submit.

KAMJE member journals span every clinical and biomedical specialty. A few of the strongest, most internationally visible routes:

• KoreaMed - a free bibliographic index (a Korean counterpart to PubMed) covering articles from Korean medical, dental, nursing, nutrition, and veterinary journals, with links out to full text.
• KoreaMed Synapse - the digital archive and reference-linking platform. It hosts full text for most member journals, assigns and resolves DOIs through CrossRef (including Similarity Check, Cited-by, and Crossmark services), and presents articles in English regardless of the original publication language.
• KOMCI - the Korean Medical Citation Index, tracking citations among Korean medical journals.
• Editor training and journal evaluation - KAMJE evaluates member journals, trains editors, and promotes international standards (working with CrossRef, DOAJ, and ORCID), which is a large part of why Korean medical journals have moved so successfully into PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science.

Most Synapse-hosted journals are Gold open access - free to read immediately, typically under Creative Commons licenses (CC BY or CC BY-NC, set per journal). There is no central KAMJE price list: each society sets its own fees, and many smaller titles charge nothing. Representative anchors:

Always check the individual journal's fee page - amounts are set in Korean won and shift with exchange rates. Self-archiving is generally permitted immediately (green OA), consistent with the platform's open-access orientation.

Peer review is run by each society journal, not by KAMJE centrally. Most member journals use single-anonymized review; a growing number offer double-anonymized review. Turnaround is a genuine strength of the leading titles: JKMS reports a median of about 2.5 weeks from submission to first decision, and Yonsei Medical Journal about 4-6 weeks. Smaller specialty titles vary more - check each journal's published statistics.

1. Pick the journal. Browse KoreaMed or Synapse by specialty, or start from the flagship titles above.
2. Read the instructions for authors. Each journal publishes its own guide; most follow the ICMJE recommendations.
3. Format references in Vancouver style. The Vancouver/ICMJE citation format dominates Korean medical journals; SciSpace templates handle this automatically.
4. Submit through the journal's own system. Most member journals run their own online submission portals (e.g., JKMS uses e-Submission at submit.jkms.org); there is no shared KAMJE-wide submission system.
5. Write in English where required. Many leading member journals publish in English; Synapse presents article metadata in English either way.

KAMJE is a COPE member and one of Asia's most active editor associations on publication ethics - it publishes Good Publication Practice guidelines for Korean journals, trains editors on misconduct handling, and requires member journals to maintain ethics policies. Individual journals follow ICMJE and COPE guidance on authorship, conflicts of interest, and retractions. The association's screening and evaluation of member journals is a meaningful quality signal: KAMJE membership is broadly treated as evidence that a Korean medical journal is legitimate.