Abstract
What an exceptional first few months! We have been delighted with the reception that JFMS Open Reports has received from the veterinary community – authors and readers alike.
We launched in May of 2015, with the aim of publishing ‘the best peer-reviewed clinical reports in feline medicine and surgery’. By the end of December, we had already built up an impressive archive of 60 articles and achieved over 6000 full-text downloads – figures that have certainly exceeded our expectations. The journal’s content is currently being reviewed for indexing in PubMed Central and we are in communication with specialty boards with a view to having JFMS Open Reports recognised as an approved journal for accreditation. All content will be retrospectively indexed and searchable should it be accepted by PubMed.
While the sister titles Journal of Feline Medicine and Surgery (JFMS) and JFMS Open Reports can be accessed and read as standalone publications, together they provide practitioners and researchers with an unsurpassed resource of international, high quality, peer-reviewed articles relevant to the clinical veterinary healthcare of domestic cats.
JFMS Open Reports has been specifically designed to be an open access, online repository for three categories of articles – case reports, short case series and short communications reporting regional prevalence of disease or other data related to well-recognised diseases. Picking just one example of each indicates the breadth of scope and the truly international nature of the journal:
First report of Cylicospirura felineus in a feral domestic shorthair cat in North America (Crossland NA, et al, case report, published July 1 2015, Baton Rouge, LA, USA)
A survey of feline leukaemia virus antigenaemia among cats in eastern Austria: a retrospective analysis of serum samples routinely tested between 1996 and 2011 (Firth CL, et al, case series, published July 29 2015, University of Vienna, Austria)
Effect of age and surgical approach on perioperative wound complication following ovariohysterectomy in shelter-housed cats in Australia (Roberts ML, et al, short communication, published October 29 2015, University of Sydney, Australia)
All clinical reports in JFMS Open Reports are freely accessible to any reader and are published under liberal creative commons licences (https://uk.sagepub.com/en-gb/eur/re-use-of-open-access-content). For authors, this means that anyone anywhere in the world can read, use and cite their clinical reports, which leads to greater visibility and impact, and may encourage collaborations and facilitate faster developments in their respective fields. At the same time, authors retain more control over, and the rights to distribute and reuse, their intellectual property. Additionally, funding agencies are increasingly requiring their funded research to be made open access.
JFMS Open Reports was launched to ISFM members in Porto, Portugal in June 2015 and to AAFP members in San Diego, USA in October 2015
A fully open access online journal is new territory for this veterinary publishing partnership of SAGE, the International Society of Feline Medicine (ISFM) and the American Association of Feline Practitioners (AAFP). We are excited about the journal, and so too were those attending this year’s annual conferences of the two societies. It is particularly pleasing that a number of authors have already benefited from a generously discounted (and highly competitive) author processing charge courtesy of their AAFP or ISFM membership. This represents a true member benefit, and we hope that the journal will help to spread the word about these dynamic and active societies to potential new audiences passionate about cats.
On behalf of the editorial team, we extend our sincere thanks to all who have contributed so far to JFMS Open Reports. We look forward to continuing our journey over this coming year.