Open Access and Online Journals in Orthopaedics: What Does the Future Hold?

Introduction: Open access journalism has expanded in the last two decades, with increasing titles in all medical specialties, including orthopaedic surgery. No study has evaluated the impact of open access orthopaedic journals or their associated risks and benefits to academic publishing and patient care. Methods: This study evaluated open access orthopaedic journals utilizing various databases including the Directly of Open Access Journals (www.DOAJ.org), PubMed Central (www.PubMed.org), Google search queries and recent articles, stories, and editorials on the topic of open access journalism. All orthopaedic surgery journals were recorded, as well as associated characteristics including publisher, year of publication, articles and issues per year, impact factor, and potential risk of a “predatory” publisher. Data were summarized and presented. Results: Our search yielded a total of 42 orthopaedic open access journals in the English language from 30 different publishers. In total, there were nearly 13,000 articles available from these journals available without a license or subscription. Of the 42 journals, 13 (31%) were considered predatory or borderline publishers, and only one had a published impact factor (IF = 0.737). In contrast, 8 of the remaining 29 journals (28%) had a published impact factor with a mean value of 1.788 (range: 0.597-4.302). Conclusion: Open access publishing is a rising trend in the orthopaedic literature, and allows for free, public and international availability of research findings. Like any new technology, open access is not without its faults, and critics have appropriately raised concerns about academic integrity and profiteering by certain publishers. Researchers and surgeons alike are responsible for maintaining the quality of the orthopaedic literature, by participating in the peer review process and avoiding the temptation to publish quickly. Case: An orthopaedic surgeon has just completed a clinical outcomes research project in his area of expertise, and desires publication in a widely read journal so that he may share his findings with the orthopaedic community. After the manuscript was rejected by two widely-read subscription-based orthopaedic journals, he submits the work to a “peer-reviewed open access” orthopaedic journal that he finds online. Within two months he receives a congratulatory acceptance letter stating that the manuscript was accepted without revision and would be published both online and in print with open access. He is required to pay a $1,400 processing fee to publish the work. He is hesitant to proceed due to his unfamiliarity with the journal title he has selected, open access publishing, and the request for a processing fee. Introduction Open access journalism is defined as the “unrestricted online access to articles published in scholarly journals.” 1 While the first open access journals did not appear in the biomedical literature until the 1990s, they have assumed an increasingly prominent role in the academic publishing arena over the past two decades. Today, calls for open access continue to grow, based on the central concept that “peer-reviewed research articles, donated for publication by authors with no expectation of compensation, should be available online, free, and with the smallest possible number of usage restrictions.” 2 However, the push towards open access has not been announced or formally introduced into the field of orthopaedics, and many surgeons are left puzzled by the vocabulary and options now available for publication. Within the framework of open access, there exist two models: gold open access, in which publishers make articles freely available to all, and green open access, in which authors upload their manuscripts to the web for distribution, often via manuscript archiving services. 3 While the former is more common in medicine (including orthopaedics) and biology, the latter is more prevalent among disciplines such as mathematics, earth sciences, social sciences, engineering and physics. 4 Other important terms include direct open access (which refers to journals that are fully available without limitations); delayed open access (which denotes free access after a defined period of time); and hybrid open access (whereby authors may choose to pay for open access or proceed with traditional subscription-based publication). 4 Most open access journals utilize a creative commons license, which permits the public to freely share, copy and distribute the work as long as the work is appropriately attributed to the authors, is not altered, and is not used for commercial purposes. 5 Given that open access journals do not generate revenue via subscription fees, they often require authors to pay article processing charges to cover the costs of each publication. A newer designation, termed “platinum open access,” has recently been coined to identify journals that do not charge article processing fees for publication. 6 In many regards, open access journalism has been supported by academicians, whose promotions and professional advancement is often determined, at least in part, by publications. The availability of a wide variety of journals in which to publish can support the ever-increasing pressures to publish novel research. At the same time, many authors have recognized the appearance of “predatory publishers,” who create low-impact journals with promises of fast review and publication for a price. To help clarify the presence, risks, and benefits to this emerging type of journalism, we designed a study is to provide a brief history of open access journals, to review the orthopaedic journals that currently participate in open access, to address the concept of predatory publishers, and to discuss the future implications of adopting this new publication paradigm. Methodology: This study was divided into three parts: journal identification, quality assessment, and open access review. Journal Identification The first part of this study involved reviewing all available sources to establish a comprehensive list of potential open access orthopaedic journals. This included surveying the Directory of Open Access Journalism (www.DOAJ.org), PubMed Central (www.PubMed.org), known open access publishers (Bentham Open, Springer Open, etc.) and utilizing various web search parameters (www.Google.com). Each site was queried by specialty as well as various search terms such as: orthopedic, orthop(a)edic(s), ortho, surgery, musculoskeletal, arthritis, joint, spine, shoulder, elbow, wrist, hand, hip, knee, ankle, and foot. A complete list was created as well as inclusion of journal details such as title, publisher, international standard serial number (ISSN), electronic ISSN, country of publication, language, first year published, article processing fees, and number of issues and articles published annually. Data were tabulated and presented in graphical form for clarity. Quality Assessment The second part of this study involved review journals for quality characteristics. This included identification of impact factor, known reputation of the publisher, and cross-referencing against published list of potential “predatory” or “borderline” publishers as identified by www.ScholarlyOA.com. An analysis was performed to evaluate risk factors for potential predatory publishers.