AN OVERVIEW OF OPEN ACCESS PUBLISHING IN SURGERY
Often publishers, and not the authors, own the rights to the scholarly articles published in journals. If someone wants to access the articles, they need to pay a fee. Access to such pay-walled research is provided by libraries and institutions to their students, researchers, and professors via expensive negotiations. Even in such cases, they are not allowed to reuse any section of the article without the publisher’s permission, which often comes with an extra charge. This is where open access helps.
For, open access breaks away these barriers and helps advance and enhance society by providing unrestricted and immediate access to latest research. Journal for Case Reports and Images in Surgery is an open access surgery journal.
What is open access surgery journal
Open access is a wide international movement seeking to grant permanent, open, and free online access to scholarly information. A publication is referred to be ‘open access’ when there are no technical, legal, or financial barriers to accessing it. So, anyone can search for, search within, read, print, distribute, copy, and download it and utilize it in education or in any other field in a lawful manner.
In an open access publishing model, the research information is made available to readers free of cost unlike the conventional subscription model, which requires readers to pay a subscription (generally through libraries) to access the scholarly works.
An open access journal for surgery like Journal for Case Reports and Images in Surgery dedicates itself to publishing the advancements made in clinical practice, education, and research pertaining to surgery. It seeks to support continual developments in surgery through sharing of latest practices, concepts, and knowledge across all surgical specialties.
Journal for Case Reports and Images in Surgery provide a forum for surgical case reports, surgical case series, clinical images, letter to editors, etc. in general surgery and allied subspecialties. They cover niches including general surgery, neurosurgery, liver surgery, gastrointestinal surgery, renal surgery, oncosurgery, paediatric surgery, cardiovascular and thoracic surgery, and transplant surgery.
The articles published in open access surgery journals like Journal for Case Reports and Images in Surgery have authoritative, practical information about clinical advances, clinical reports, case series, procedures, and key trends shaping surgery. These contributions are usually peer reviewed to ensure high quality.
What is the importance of having an open access surgery journal?
A declaration called the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities was signed by several international bodies for academic research in 2003 to support open access.
According to it- “Our mission of disseminating knowledge is only half complete if the information is not made widely and readily available to society.” This is what Journal for Case Reports and Images in Surgery seeks as a journal publishing open access articles in all specialties of surgery.
The importance of open access publishing in surgery lies in its many indispensable advantages. Those are discussed below.
1. Provides high visibility to research work
An open access framework in surgery provides authors in the field with the copyright to their scholarly work. So they are free to share it with anyone at any place and at any time. And since there is no fee charged from readers to access, share, or download their article, it has a wider reach.
2. Enables better discoverability of scholarly articles
Open access makes scholarly work in surgery more visible and discoverable. It helps authors to get noticed and get credit for their work in the form of getting cited in other articles. Further, since open access articles are easily searchable, fully indexed, open to text and data mining, and machine readable, anyone can find them online. This becomes particularly useful for surgeons, physicians, medical students, and professors across the world.
3. Facilitates reuse of academic research results
Open access allows one’s scholarly work to be available immediately in whole for reading as well as reusing and remixing with proper acknowledgement. Due to the lack of undesirable barriers, restrictions, and delays in open access, published work helps open up opportunities for other researchers in surgery. For, they can build on the findings of the published work without any limitations. This enables science to advance faster.
4. Informs, educates, and enlightens the world
Open access publishing in surgery enables everyone, and not just a specific section of other researchers, to benefit from one’s published work. So, readers, students, patients, professors, policymakers, and funders worldwide can take part in this field of science. This magnifies the power of research to inform, educate, and enlighten.
How to evaluate the quality of open access surgery journals?
Not all surgery journals claiming to provide open access can be trusted blindly. You need to ensure that the journal you choose for publishing your scholarly work for open access meets the established requirements.
The better the quality of the journal in which you publish your paper, the better will be your reputation as an author. So, choose the right open access journal for publishing your work after determining its scientific competence and quality. Journal for Case Reports and Images in Surgery is a high-quality journal publishing open access articles in all sub-specialities of surgery.
