Open Access News

Last month marks a year since the Journal of Medical Internet Research was re-launched under its new framework. A website launch is a scary, exciting event: things can go horribly wrong, things you had never anticipated happen, and occasionally, things work out right....It's amazing to look back and see how it has grown and changed during that time - JMIR has doubled by almost all metrics, and even tripled (or more) in a few. For example:

* unique monthly visitors have increased from 11,000 to 31,000
* monthly hits have gone from under 200,000 to over 630,000
* monthly visits were a constant 15,000 in 2004, growing to 56,000 in 2005
* registered readers (9,508), authors (2,000), and peer reviewers (909) have all doubled
* 25 institutions and 236 people bought memberships in the first year on average, every 4 seconds, someone is viewing a page of the journal

...Aggregate statistics tell part of the story, but what's particularly noteworthy is that the new people who are visiting JMIR are staying longer, reading it more, and regularly checking it:

* average visit duration increased from 230 seconds to 334 seconds
* twice as many visitors (8%) are staying for longer than 30 minutes
* unique visitors returned 1.79 times on average, up from 1.37 times
* RSS feeds account for over 25% of traffic (meaning many people are using them)
* the number of people adding JMIR to their bookmarks tripled from 5% to 14%
* traffic from bookmarks/RSS increased from 61% to 77%

Not bad for an independently-published, specialized, (predominantly) online-only, non-profit, Open Access journal. Perhaps the Royal Society's recent statement on Open Access doesn't stand up to the reality of journals like JMIR. In fact, the quality and quantity of research published by JMIR has only increased (33 articles in 2003, 49 in 2004, almost 60 in 2005 - while maintaining the same acceptance rate of around 45%). At the same time, agreements with CrossRef, ISI, and PubMed Central...all serve to increase the visibility and dissemination of high-quality academic research published in JMIR. When I think of this evidence as to the incredible potential of Open Access publishing models, I'm reminded of the journal's acknowledgement statement:

The Journal of Medical Internet Research is a non-profit academic project, by eHealth researchers for eHealth researchers, without involvement of any major publishers. We are convinced that the Internet opens novel ways to publish and peer-review scholarly work independently from any of the large publishing houses, and this Journal is a living example. We also think that research work should remain the property of the creator and be distributed under an Open Access model (as opposed to researchers signing away the copyright of their work).

The revolution, it would seem, is succeeding.