Open Access Publications is our mission in 2022: perspective from the editors of the European Journal of Clinical Investigation - Montecucco - - European Journal of Clinical Investigation - Wiley Online Library

"The impact factor of the European Journal of Clinical Investigation (EJCI) and also of other scientific journals has dramatically increased in 2020. At the Editorial Board Meeting in September 2021, we felt very proud of our work since January 2020, when we became the new Editors of EJCI. In contrast to other journals, we managed to attract not only COVID-19- 1, 2 but also non-COVID-19-related articles 3, 4 receiving many citations and contributing to the impact factor of 2020. Obviously, we are indebted to all authors choosing EJCI for their submissions/publications as well to all reviewers involved in judging the submitted manuscripts (list of reviewers displayed in Table 1). We have the impression that our Journal not only gained in terms of quality as expressed in the higher impact factor, but also in the organization of handling the increasing number of submissions. Despite the COVID-19 pandemic-related involvement in clinical and scientific work, the time of revision and final decision were markedly reduced in 2020 and established in 2021. At the Editorial Meeting, we discussed how to further improve our Journal in the near future. There was a broad consensus stating that we should push on the quality of Research Articles, Reviews and Editorials. Although it seems quite obvious, this mission appears to be a real challenge for Editors. What is “quality” of an article? Consensus was obtained on appropriate methodological requirements, high clinical relevance and usefulness for patients’ care. This should hold for both basic/translational and clinical research. Based on these criteria that will be our “North Star” for next year, we also realized that after selecting a top-level article, it is mandatory to promote its diffusion as well. In this regard, we acknowledge that all articles should be pushed to be freely shared in an “Open Access” (OA) mode. OA means that the article has not any financial, legal or technical barriers to be consulted by any reader from all over the world. The relevance of OA has been excellently demonstrated during the COVID-19 pandemic. Also, the European Community has indicated that the principal investigators of European Grants should publish their articles from the funded project as OA. One major issue is that publishing OA requires a payment of a fee per article by the author to the publisher, the so-called article processing charge (APC). The mean APC is around €2000 but varies greatly between journals from €1000 to €5000 per article. Therefore, some financial issues in particular from low-income countries might limit worldwide spread of science. In order to avoid this practical, but fundamental burden, we would inform the readers that our publisher Wiley has implemented some conventions with institutes, universities and even countries (Figure 1) in order to cover the APC of the OA publications...."