“Introduction: Open access journalism has expanded in the last two decades, with increasing titles in all medical specialties, including orthopaedic surgery. No study has evaluated the impact of open access orthopaedic journals or their associated risks and benefits to academic publishing and patient care.
Methods: This study evaluated open access orthopaedic journals utilizing various databases including the Directly of Open Access Journals (www.DOAJ.org), PubMed Central (www.PubMed.org), Google search queries and recent articles, stories, and editorials on the topic of open access journalism. All orthopaedic surgery journals were recorded, as well as associated characteristics including publisher, year of publication, articles and issues per year, impact factor, and potential risk of a “predatory” publisher. Data were summarized and presented.
Results: Our search yielded a total of 42 orthopaedic open access journals in the English language from 30 different publishers. In total, there were nearly 13,000 articles available from these journals available without a license or subscription. Of the 42 journals, 13 (31%) were considered predatory or borderline publishers, and only one had a published impact factor (IF = 0.737). In contrast, 8 of the remaining 29 journals (28%) had a published impact factor with a mean value of 1.788 (range: 0.597-4.302).
Conclusion: Open access publishing is a rising trend in the orthopaedic literature, and allows for free, public and international availability of research findings. Like any new technology, open access is not without its faults, and critics have appropriately raised concerns about academic integrity and profiteering by certain publishers. Researchers and surgeons alike are responsible for maintaining the quality of the orthopaedic literature, by participating in the peer review process and avoiding the temptation to publish quickly.”
URL : http://www.coa.org/docs/2014AnnualMeeting/9FrankoOrrinOpenAccessOrthopaedics.pdf