Open Medicine at five years

The authors are members of the Open Medicine team. ➣ The launch of open Medicine five years ago combined traditional scholarly values with modern norms of open access to information. Those of us who had worked within the framework of conventional medical journal publishing had observed how editorial independence in scholarly publishing could be eroded by the influence of revenue-driven and professional interests. 1 We saw an opportunity to create a different kind of journal. Our re-emerging editorial team adopted the principles of editorial autonomy and open access to research. We created a journal built on technological innovation , collaborative education and enterprise—one that would " give back " to the community of open source software and open access scholarly publishing. In our first month, our website was visited by tens of thousands of readers, while attracting press coverage from across Canada and beyond. Scientific American, 2 along with a number of bloggers, took particular note of one of Open Medicine's inaugural papers, which compared health care expenditures and outcomes in the United States and Canada. 3 Open Medicine content has been sparking interest among journalists, researchers, and the general public ever since. Open Medicine provides an independent forum to debate issues related to medical practice, health research, and health policy for the Canadian and international medical community. It represents a significant achievement on the part of our editorial team and all of our supporters—especially in view of the fact that almost all processes are volunteer-driven and rely heavily on the dedication of team members to the value of making medical research findings accessible to all. With new opportunities on the horizon, we look to the next five years with optimism and excitement. Although our content has been appearing in MEDLINE only for one year, our H-index—a measure of the impact of published work—is already a respectable 12. Between the journal's launch and 24 April 2012, we received 508 manuscript submissions and published 146 individual articles, including in-house editorials, and have received consistently robust coverage in the lay media. Open Medicine's commitment to editorial independence has allowed us to provide frank commentary and analysis on ethical and policy issues such as conflict of interest 4–6 and evidence-based policies on harm reduction. 7,8 Our editorial independence has also allowed us to respond flexibly to current issues in biomedical publishing. Examples include editorials and guidance on policies concerning ghostwriting, 9 financial conflict …