Abstract
Let us, then, be up and doing, With a heart for any fate; Still achieving, still pursuing, Learn to labor and to wait. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, A Psalm of Life
The seed for OJSM was planted in 2002, when I first became Editor-in-Chief of AJSM. Although I’d had experience in journal reviewing and textbook editing, I recognized that I still had a lot to learn about editing and publishing a scholarly medical journal. Upon the advice of Donna Tilton, our current Senior Editorial and Production Manager, and Ann Donaldson, our Managing Editor at the time, I joined the Council of Science Editors and enrolled in the course for new editors offered at its annual meeting. Not only did I gain many useful insights from the course itself, but the rest of the meeting provided an excellent overview of the contemporary landscape of scientific publishing.
A keynote speaker at the CSE that year promoted the concept of open access publishing for scientific journals. The gist of his argument was that new scientific knowledge should be made available to all who might benefit from it without the barrier of a subscription paywall. This was especially true for government sponsored research, he reasoned, because the public had already paid for the research through their government mandated taxes and should not have to pay a second time to access its results.
I remember thinking that his quest seemed noble but quixotic. His arguments made sense from an ethical standpoint, but not from a practical one. If the costs of publishing a journal were not to be offset by subscription fees, the money to cover them would have to come from somewhere. It seemed likely that governments and foundations that funded scientific research would be willing to pay a little more to make it freely available, but that only accounted for a small fraction of the research output in our field. Some foundations would be willing to provide seed money to support pioneer open access journals, but those funds would be limited and hardly enough to sustain all scientific publishing.
Ten years later, the scientific publishing landscape had changed. Online publishing of medical journals had expanded tremendously and become the norm. Many readers, especially “digital natives”, primarily or exclusively accessed journal content electronically. Thus, a journal that was published solely online had the potential to be read widely and enjoy reduced production costs. Outside of orthopaedics, open access journals in medicine and other scientific fields had demonstrated that a journal could be successfully financed via article processing charges (APCs) paid by the research sponsors, foundation grants, the authors’ institutions, or the authors themselves. Prominent journals such as Nature had begun to establish open access affiliates. I thought that the time was right to introduce the open access publishing model to the orthopaedic sports medicine community.
Together with our publishing consultant Morna Conway, I developed a plan for an open access affiliate for AJSM. Our publisher, SAGE, was just entering the world of open access publishing in other fields and was enthusiastic about the idea. When we introduced the proposal to the AOSSM Medical Publishing Board of Trustees, the reaction was mixed. To some, the payment of an APC when a paper was accepted for publication sounded like vanity publishing. We acknowledged that there is an inherent risk of abuse in the APC system, in that an unscrupulous journal could accept virtually every submission, regardless of quality, just to maximize its income. Publishing ventures of this sort are often described as predatory journals. OJSM, we assured them, would not be that type of journal. The plan was to subject every submission to the same rigorous peer-review process that we utilized at AJSM. APCs would only be assessed if an article were accepted. We would explain to the orthopaedic community that the purpose of the APC system was not asking authors to pay to get their work published, but to make their work openly available to the world community. OJSM’s APCs were established well below the prevailing rate in the industry, and they were further discounted in tiers determined by the World Bank’s assessment of the strength of the economy in the authors’ home country.
Publication in OJSM would be gold open access: articles would be freely accessible throughout the world immediately upon publication. As with AJSM, authors would retain copyright. Open access articles are published with a Creative Commons license that dictates how third parties can use their contents. We recommended that authors choose the Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivatives license, unless an unrestricted license was required by their funding source. This means that other authors using material from articles published in OJSM would need to attribute the original article and could not modify the article or use it for commercial purposes without the consent of the OJSM authors.
Besides providing orthopaedic sports medicine researchers with a gold open access venue for publishing their work, OJSM was also designed to be a vehicle for international collaboration. Other orthopaedic specialty societies were invited to become partners in this innovative undertaking. Members of partner societies are assessed a discounted APC when they have an article accepted in OJSM. The logo of each society is featured on the OJSM website, seamlessly linking to the society’s own website, and every partner is represented on the OJSM editorial board. Partner societies are entitled to freely publish their meeting abstracts and consensus statements in OJSM. As the stature of OJSM has grown, so has the number of professional societies seeking to be affiliated with it. At last count, 39 professional associations in specialties including arthroscopy, sports medicine, knee surgery, and shoulder surgery are affiliated with OJSM. Not only do these societies span the globe, but as some of their countries of origin have territorial claims in Antarctica, we like to say that our partnerships encompass all 7 terrestrial continents.
If there was any skepticism about the open access concept in the orthopaedic community when OJSM first appeared, it seems to have evaporated. OJSM has received over 8000 submissions in its first decade, and the number continues to increase annually. More than 200,000 OJSM full-text articles are now downloaded monthly, clear evidence of the popularity of its content and the benefit of free, immediate access.
When OJSM was indexed on PubMed Central in 2014, all previous and subsequent articles became searchable in PubMed, further increasing their accessibility to readers around the world. In 2019, OJSM was selected for inclusion in Journal Citation Reports and became one of the few open access journals in orthopaedics to be awarded an Impact Factor. Since then, OJSM’s 2-year Impact Factor has increased to 3.401 and its 5-year Impact Factor to 3.975, reflecting the status of its articles in the research community. It is gratifying to see how often OJSM articles are now routinely cited in presentations at major orthopaedic congresses and discussed in journal clubs.
Launching an open access journal in 2013 proved to be a prescient decision. Since then, most major orthopaedic journals have followed suit by initiating an open access affiliate. More importantly, there is an increasing groundswell of activity from funding sources and academic institutions to encourage or require open access publication of research. In 2018, a consortium of national research agencies and funders from 12 European countries came together to form Coalition S. 3 Their original Plan S required that all research within their domains be published in a fully open access manner by 2021. This policy was subsequently modified to allow for a transition period through December 2024 and the coalition has now grown beyond Europe. 2 In the United States, the Office of Science and Technology Policy has issued a recommendation that all federal agencies should update their public access policies as soon as possible, and no later than December 31st, 2025, to make publications and their supporting data resulting from federally funded research publicly accessible without an embargo on their free and public release. 1 Of course, these developments do not directly affect research performed outside of academic institutions or without government or foundation funding, but they reinforce the stature of quality open access journals.
The quality of a scientific journal is determined by the individuals who contribute to it. Colleen Briars served as our original editorial manager and liaison to the partner societies. Jude Connors now ably fulfills this role. From its inception, OJSM has been blessed by a plethora of authors who believed in the concept of an open access journal and contributed their work, and reviewers who were willing to devote their time and intellect to evaluate and refine the submissions. I am especially grateful for the editors who have joined the venture. The first two, Allen Anderson and Mark Steiner, saw the potential in a start-up project with no track record but an audacious vision. Sadly, neither of them is still with us to celebrate this anniversary. Dan Wascher, Don Fithian, Keith Kenter, and Julian Feller have successively signed on and now devote their considerable talents to directing the peer-review process at OJSM.
No one can predict with certainty whether the open access model will completely supplant the subscription model in medical publishing or continue to thrive alongside it. The APC system can present challenges to authors from middle-income countries with unstable currencies or whose institutions do not support the funding of medical research. What is clear is that open access publishing will continue to blossom and grow as a means to disseminate new knowledge to the world readership. OJSM is proud of the accomplishments of its first 10 years and looks forward to the next decade of growth as it pursues its mission of serving the international orthopaedics and sports medicine communities.
Footnotes
This editorial has been copublished in The American Journal of Sports Medicine.