Beyond open access

Nursing Open is an open access, pay to publish journal which is dedicated to the highest standards in open access publishing. We believe that authors should have the opportunity to make their work freely available to others to download and read, with the ensuing benefits that this entails, both for readers and authors. However, open access opens up further possibilities that are not always available to publishing by the more traditional route of pay to view: that of making your work directly available on a wide range of platforms and also promoting your work in the process. Specifically, I am referring to the use of online social media and among the possibilities are Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, blogging and podcasting. By any of these means – and many of these can be interlinked so that entries on one are automatically relayed by the other platform – you can tell the world about your work and add a link which allows people to read it at no cost. At Nursing Open, we help to promote your work via our Twitter site and our blog. Currently, our policy is to promote every paper on Twitter at the point of going online and also to produce a blog entry for each paper and to promote the blog link on Twitter. However, as the journal grows – and it is growing – we may be unable to promote every paper on our blog. This is where authors can help; have you considered writing a blog entry (we can put that up on our site or make a link to yours), recording a YouTube clip or speaking about your work in a podcast? If not, I would strongly urge you to think about it. Using social media is remarkably easy, and making recordings that can be uploaded to YouTube or on a podcast is also remarkably easy and I want to offer some advice here to our authors and readers who may want to promote their work.