In Gratitude - Bruce Reider, 2024

"Five years after the confab that produced Sports Health, AOSSM and the MPBOT held another strategic planning session. This time, the open access concept that had been simmering in the back of my mind bubbled up into consciousness. After the Great Chicago Fire, Daniel Burnham’s motto for the redevelopment of the Lake Michigan lakefront was “Forever open, clear, and free.” This mantra had worked for Chicago, and I thought it could work for orthopaedic sports medicine too. In the years since I first encountered the idea in 2002, open access publishing had gained traction in the mainstream scientific community and was beginning to appear in other medical specialties. I thought that it was only a matter of time before orthopaedics embraced the concept, so introducing an open access sports medicine journal now would allow us to establish our bona fides before other publishing groups awakened to the idea. Although early open access journals were often financed by foundation grants, a more sustainable business model based on article processing charges (APCs) had become the norm. With the support of our longtime publishing consultant Morna Conway and SAGE, I set about introducing open access publishing to the MPBOT. Some members were concerned that the payment of APCs might be viewed as tainting the peer-review process. We acknowledged that, while this was in fact the case with so-called predatory journals, The Orthopaedic Journal of Sports Medicine (OJSM) would establish itself as a serious high-quality publication by utilizing the same rigorous peer-review process as AJSM and Sports Health and charging APCs that would sustain the journal but were below the prevailing market rates. In addition, OJSM would provide an outstanding opportunity for collaboration with other professional societies, this time on an international level. The alacrity with which 39 specialty societies in sports medicine, arthroscopic surgery, knee surgery, and shoulder surgery became OJSM’s publishing partners validated our conviction that the time for open access publishing in our field had indeed arrived. The subsequent proliferation of open access orthopaedic journals has provided further confirmation of the timeliness of our project. To our gratification, OJSM has matured since its 2013 debut into an oft-cited journal with a strong impact factor and h5-index. OJSM will exceed 4 million full-text downloads in 2024, a testament to the power of barrier-free publication...."