PRS enters expanding open access arena with launch of spinoff journal - PSEN Portal

"Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery has developed a reputation for innovation among medical journals by constantly exploring new technology to deliver scientific content in dynamic ways. This spring, PRS will continue to push the digital envelope by entering the rapidly expanding open access (OA) movement with the launch of an online companion journal, PRS Global Open (PRS-GO), which is now accepting submissions through PRS's existing enkwell system at editorialmanager.com/prs. The OA concept - publishing peer-reviewed research online for anyone in the world to access for free (institutions or authors commonly pay an article processing charge to cover costs related to production) - is as old as the Internet itself. From 2000 to 2009, however, the volume of scholarly articles available in open access journals grew tenfold; the number of OA journals during that period grew from 70 to more than 4,700, according to a 2011 study in PLoS One, an OA journal published by the Public Library of Science. 'Open access is a true innovation in surgical review journals," says PRS Editor-in-Chief Rod Rohrich, MD.'It is growing rapidly across all fields of study, particularly medicine. Entering the open access arena will allow PRS to remain at the leading edge of scientific publishing.' The growth of OA has been bolstered by the requirements of major funding agencies in the United States and Europe, including the National Institutes of Health, to provide public access to the published results of the research they sponsor. 'The NIH has the exemplary open access policy, in which its grantees are free to publish anywhere they want, but they have to make the peer-reviewed manuscript available [via] open access in PubMed Central, a repository hosted by NIH,' says Peter Suber, director of the Harvard Open Access Project, which is dedicated to fostering the growth of open access. 'Because the NIH is so big - it's the world's largest funder of scientific research - it gives us a huge advantage over other countries that are moving more slowly. On the other hand, it's only one funding agency, and a small part of our publicly funded research. In the United Kingdom, all of the public-funding agencies are moving toward open access policies.'  PRS joins a host of other major journals, such as Nature and Journal of the American Heart Association, to introduce open-access companion journals. Buoyed by the strong reputations of their parent journals, open-access offshoots typically have less-stringent criteria governing the acceptance of articles, yet they can surpass their parent journals in terms of reach and impact factor because of the accessibility of the articles. Lippincott, Williams & Wilkins, the publisher of PRS, will apply for indexing as soon as the journal has fulfilled the requisite threshold to do so ..."