Open Access Journals: Ready for Prime Time?

Abstract

Open-access journal; Peer reviewAre open access journals as scholarly and prestigious as subscription-only journals? With the advent of open access journals, you might ask these questions before submitting an article for publication or quoting the results from an open access journal study. Clinicians want immediate access to information and that access to evidence based practice (EBP) promotes research analysis for translation to bedside. Internet access is all that is needed for access to the articles; readership is not restricted by subscription.Open access is integrated with the information environment that is formed by search engines, such as Google Scholar, making articles available with only a word search [1]. Readers do not have to look for specific journals but rather, search according to specific topics. The option for anyone to use these search engines can lead to a better informed public and allow authors to teach the public and to encourage verification of facts. Additionally, articles published in open access had no difference than hard copies in regards to length or word usage [2].Primary research among scientists and translational research among clinicians is not mutually exclusive. Information is free and freely exchanged. The impact of open access has been felt globally. With the growing access to online information, diseases such as malaria may see a significant decrease. Over 90% of malaria mortality occurs in Africa. There are many African medical journals, but most are paper-based or online via subscription only and not available in PubMed. The growth of Malaria Journal over 9 years is due to its being the first open access journal in tropical medicine and helping first-time authors to present their work [3].Certainly, open access can lead to a greater number of downloads of an article. In Davis’s study, 712 articles were randomly assigned to open access, leaving 2533 articles as the control group. The open access articles received more downloads from a broader audience than traditional publications, yet were no more frequently or earlier cited than subscription controlled articles in a 3 year period [4]. Actual downloads has a number of limitations if equated with reading an article; there is no way to know who downloaded an article or if it was used, and robots probably account for much of the increase in downloads [5].Often article downloads measure general interest in a particular subject, while citations measure the incorporation of that knowledge into a new document [4]. Citations imply the article was read and therefore, used by the research community. If this is the case, the real beneficiaries of online access are probably the communities of practice rather than the research community, who traditionally have access to scientific literature.With the growth of the internet and near immediate access to digital information from many sources, it seems inevitable that scholarly peer-reviewed journals would follow suit. Common open access forums such as Wikipedia, Blogs, and web pages allow freely downloadable access to information but lack a formalized, verifiable, and transparent review process. Peer-reviewed open access journals seek to incorporate the benefits of open access with a formalized peer-review process mirroring traditional subscription based journals. Open access journals are relative newcomers to the established subscription