So it is time

So it is time. I had rather hoped it would never come but, well now you have it, our journal has soon to start charging for publication. You see, for the past almost two years our generous publisher – OUP-has absorbed the costs of an incredible scientific output that has placed JHPS in the very forefront of publishing in the field of hip preservation surgery. Forefront? Let me show you. I did a count the other day and was astonished at what I found. Between May and September 2015 there were 88 papers on hip arthroscopy published in 22 journals. Of the 88, 53 (60.2%) were published in JHPS. Astonishing! How can any journal publish such a huge percentage of specialty papers in such a short time? This sheer number, added to the most recent inclusion of the journal by PubMed Central, has placed JHPS dead centre of the hip preservation map. This must be near record performance for a journal that has not yet existed for a full two years. The attraction of our journal is that it is gold Open Access (OA). That means that any published paper is freely available to anyone who cares to access the internet. There can surely be no better way to spread the message of scientific research? Yet costs have to be defrayed. A ball-park figure for the cost of publishing a single, subscription-only print and online paper is US$4871. For subscription online only it is US$3509 while for Open Access online only the cost is US$2289 [1]. The cost savings of Open Access are huge but the money must still be found. Of course, all papers have to be paid for, even those for subscription-only journals. It is just with a subscription the publication costs are hidden. Hidden perhaps by being absorbed into an increased society or association membership fee. Or, hidden by a subscription you directly pay yourself.With a subscription journal, a reader is paying for the publications of his colleagues, too. For OA, authors pay for their own costs alone. Many authors are unaware how much work goes in to preparing their paper for publication and why any costs are applicable at all. Yet how about these for a list of tasks – administering peer review, editing, proof reading, typeset-ting, graphics, quality assurance, indexes, rights management , sales and payments, online user management, marketing and communications, helpdesk, online hosting, …