Open Access to the World – IncreasingJournalVisibility

Abstract

With the first issue of 2004 the American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education will be “open access,” available to everyone at www.ajpe.org, free of charge and without need of a password. Also, the number of Journal issues will increase from 4 to 6 per year. The Board of Directors reached these decisions at the request of the Editor. Changing the Journal to open access is consistent with AACP’s strategic goal of enhancing its members’ influence and visibility beyond pharmacy education in the United States. Journal authors are leaders in health professions education by describing their innovative instructional methods, and these advances should be available to the larger pharmacy education community. The increase in the number of issues published per year is possible and necessary because the number of manuscripts submitted to the Journal has increased by almost 100% in the past 2 years. Open access will dramatically increase readership of the Journal. Increased readership will enhance the value of the Journal, attract more contributors, and expand the influence of authors and AACP in general. An open-access Journal will better serve the needs of authors as well as the United States and international pharmacy education community. The Journal will now be made available to thousands of full-time, part-time, and adjunct faculty members and preceptors throughout the United States. Also, open access allows electronic transmission of the Journal to organizations and pharmacy educators around the world. At the same time we can promote United States pharmacy education to schools and colleges developing around the world and increase our awareness of the best that international programs can offer to us. By now, most readers are aware of the open-access movement in journal publishing as well as the exploding costs to libraries for journals that are owned by some of the large publishing houses. The number of open-access journals is ~700 and is growing. The open-access movement is spearheaded by the Public Library of Science and BioMed Central, organizations that are attempting to create new systems for making academic information available to a wider audience. While the open-access movement is gaining ground, journals that require paid subscriptions will continue to exist for the foreseeable future. Advocates of the open access movement claim that it will “accelerate research in every discipline.” There are some indications that papers that appear free online are more frequently cited by other researchers than papers that have restricted distribution. Open access can enhance the attractiveness of the Journal to indexing services and Medline as well as increase Journal “impact” as measured by citation analysis. However, open access brings some challenges. Open access or not, print or online, journals are still expensive to produce and “open access” should not be confused with “free.” While readers would not pay for access, the costs are paid for in other ways. The financial support for the Journal comes from individual and institutional subscriptions and dues. While the Journal expense is lower than many comparable academic journals, we will continue to seek ways to increase value to readers (AACP members and nonmembers) in costeffective ways.