The Journals of the Society of Medical Decision Making
- About MDM Policy & Practice
- About Medical Decision Making
- Manuscript Types and Authorship
- Manuscript Requirements
- Manuscript Submission
- Journal Policies
- Open Access, Archiving, & Copyright
- Become a Reviewer!
- Review Process
- Graphical Abstracts
- Calls for Papers
- Web Resources
- International Patient Decision Aids Standards (IPDAS) Update (2021)
- ISPOR-SMDM Joint Modeling Task Force (2010-2012)
- Contact the Editorial Office
MDM Policy & Practice
MDM Policy & Practice
is a “Gold” Open Access (OA) journal. All published articles are freely available online under a Creative Commons (“CC”) license and are indexed and freely available in PubMedCentral®. Authors of accepted manuscripts pay an article processing fee to support open-access publication. MDM P&P is online only and is not published in print.
MDM P&P’s article processing charge (APC) is USD$2,500 for all manuscripts received through 31 August 2025, increasing to USD $3,000 for new manuscripts received 01 September 2025 or later, payable on formal manuscript acceptance. A discounted rate of USD$2,000 [not changing] is available for author teams with at least one author who is a current member of the Society for Medical Decision Making (SMDM).
Your institution may be able to help you to cover all or part of your article’s open access article processing charge (APC) if they have an Open Access agreement or open access prepaid account (OAPA) in place with SAGE. You may alternately be eligible for a discount due to your institutional affiliation. Please identify your affiliation after your paper is accepted for publication to check if any discounts of fee waivers are available to you.
As described in SAGE’s policy on Gold Open Access Article Processing Charge Waivers , SAGE provides partial and full waivers of the APC to authors who reside in the countries described by the Research4Life program. SAGE uses the corresponding author’s affiliation to automatically apply the R4L waivers in the SAGE Open Access Portal. The waiver will be automatically applied if the corresponding author is from a country on the current country list: https://www.research4life.org/access/eligibility/ . Authors do not need to apply for or request a waiver as long as they disclosed on submission that they are from a country on the list. If an author from a listed country does not receive a waiver for an accepted article and believes that they do qualify, they should contact openaccess@Sagepub.com to check and apply.
Medical Decision Making
Medical Decision Making
offers authors of primary research articles a hybrid open access (OA) option. Under the hybrid OA publishing option, called SAGE Choice, the article is published under a Creative Commons license, so that the article is freely accessible on the journal’s website and authors may further distribute the final published version of their article in accordance with the respective CC license, including depositing the published PDF version in their funding agency’s preferred archive, if applicable. Authors of accepted manuscripts who wish to publish their article under the SAGE Choice option pay an article processing fee. The SAGE Choice option will be made available by SAGE to authors of primary research articles only after acceptance of their paper for publication. The policy of delaying the offer of the OA option is intended to prevent any potential conflicts of interest, and to ensure that authors’ choice / funder requirements have no influence on the editorial peer review and decision-making process. Authors who do not wish to publish under SAGE Choice are under no pressure to do so, and their article will be published free of charge, in the usual manner. Please visit
http://www.sagepub.com/sagechoice.sp
for more information about the SAGE Choice program.
The article processing fee for MDM’s SAGE Choice option is USD$4,400 for articles accepted in 2025, and this fee may
increase in future years.
Note, however, that some organizations have transformative agreements with SAGE publications that provide either discounts or waivers to the SAGE Choice fee.
For general information on open access at SAGE please visit the Open Access page or view SAGE’s Open Access Support .
SAGE’s Author Archiving and Re-Use Guidelines
The following section is a slightly edited copy of the guidelines presented on the SAGE Author Archiving and Re-Use Guidelines page . It is repeated here for author convenience.
These guidelines should be followed by authors of articles published in a SAGE subscription journal, including authors whose articles were published under a previous version of the author guidelines.
Three versions of the articles are referenced in these guidelines:
- Original Submission: the version submitted by the author before peer review
- Accepted Manuscript: version updated to include the author’s revisions after peer review, prior to any typesetting for the journal
- Final Published PDF: copy-edited and typeset Publisher’s PDF, the same version published on the journal’s website
Sharing Gold Open Access Articles [Applicable to all MDM P&P articles and MDM articles published as SAGE Choice]
- You may share the Original Submission or Accepted Manuscript at any time after your paper is accepted and in any format.
Once your article has been published, you may also share the Final Published PDF version in accordance with
the CC license terms. The Creative Commons non-commercial (CC-BY-NC) license is used with articles published as SAGE
Choice, unless a different license is required by the author’s funding agency. Under the CC-BY-NC license, you may also
share the Final Published PDF of your article for non-commercial purposes as long as you follow the
constraints of the Creative Commons license.
Sharing Green Open Access Articles [Applicable to MDM articles NOT published using SAGE Choice]
You may share the Original Submission or Accepted Manuscript at any time after your paper is accepted and in any format. Your sharing may include posting a downloadable copy on any website, saving a copy in any repository or network, sharing a copy through any social media channel, and distributing print or electronic copies.
For information on use of Institutional Repository (IR) copies by authors and IR users, see Posting to an Institutional Repository – Green Open Access .
[NOTE: This policy means that authors may not only submit their accepted manuscripts to repositories such as PubMedCentral® immediately upon acceptance but that authors may instruct the repository to publicly release the work immediately thereafter. In other words, authors do NOT need to instruct PubMedCentral® or similar repositories to embargo the work for any period of time.]
All authors, whether their article was published under the OA or traditional model, may use the Final Published PDF (or Original Submission or Accepted Manuscript, if preferred) in the following ways:
- in relation to their own teaching, provided that any electronic distribution maintains restricted access
- to share on an individual basis with research colleagues, provided that such sharing is not for commercial purposes
- in their dissertation or thesis, including where it will be posted in any electronic Institutional Repository or database
- in a book authored or edited by them, at any time after the article’s publication in the journal
Provided that:
- Access to the Original Submission and Accepted Manuscript is provided at no charge.
- Any re-use terms for users of websites and repositories are restricted to non-commercial and no derivative uses.
- You may not post the Final Published PDF on any unrestricted website or repository without permission from SAGE.
- You may not republish or translate any version of your Contribution in another journal without prior permission from SAGE.
The journal as the original publication is appropriately credited, including full citation information each time your
Contribution is further distributed or re-used.
Manuscript Production, Prepublication Policy, Publication, and Copyright
For Medical Decision Making, all authors, except government employees whose work was done as part of their official duties and is in the public domain, sign an agreement granting exclusive license to publish their article to the owner of Medical Decision Making, the Society for Medical Decision Making (SMDM) .
For MDM Policy & Practice, authors provide the SMDM with license to publish the article under a Creative Commons non-commercial (CC BY-NC) license, and unless a CC-BY license is required by their funding agency, the license transfers an exclusive license for commercial use to SMDM.
Signing the Publishing Agreement
Immediately on formal acceptance, authors will be prompted to sign the publishing agreement via SAGETrack at MDM or MDM P&P. Government employees who are required to submit a different form must contact the MDM editorial office directly.
Production and Publication of Your Article
Once forwarded to SAGE for production, the production editor contacts the author with proofs after typesetting. The electronic version is published as soon as final proofs are processed, and articles appear via OnlineFirst prior to assignment to an issue.
Research Articles Funded by the Wellcome Trust and National Institutes of Health
The NIH Policy on Enhancing Public Access encourages investigators to upload the Accepted Manuscript to PubMedCentral®. SAGE’s Green Open Access policy allows immediate public release without embargo.
The Final Published PDFs of all articles published in MDM Policy & Practice are automatically available in PubMedCentral®.
Authors of accepted manuscripts in Medical Decision Making may either: (1) pay a SAGE Choice fee so the Final Published PDF is made available in PubMedCentral®, or (2) submit the Accepted Manuscript to PubMedCentral®.