The growth of open access journals

The 6th annual open access week is upon us, and one of the topics of particular interest to BMC Medicine is how open access (OA) publishing has been developing over the last decade.

The growth of OA journals is apparent to anyone following scholarly publishing, and much speculation has focused around the citation rates and overall quality of articles published in OA journals. In July, research published in BMC Medicine by Bo-Christer Björk and David Solomon showed that the scientific impact of articles published in OA and subscription journals are similar when journal discipline, location of publisher and age of publication are compared, which is particularly true in medicine and health, where OA journals founded in the last 10 years receive on average as many citations as subscription journals launched during the same time...