BMJ Open is an online-only, open access general medical journal, dedicated to publishing medical research from all disciplines and therapeutic areas. The journal publishes all research study types, from study protocols to phase I trials to meta-analyses, including small or potentially low-impact studies. Publishing procedures are built around fully open peer review and continuous publication, publishing research online as soon as the article is ready.

The journal aims to promote transparency in the publication process by publishing reviewer reports and previous versions of manuscripts as pre-publication histories.

BMJ Open is the first medical journal to partner with Dryad, an online repository, run by staff based at the British Library and University of Oxford, which provides a permanent, citable, and accessible home for datasets related to peer reviewed published articles in biosciences.  

We are very pleased to be one of the sponsors of Open Access Week and hope you all enjoy the week ahead.

To find out more about BMJ Open, please visit bmjopen.bmj.com

GrandIR is a recently founded startup providing technical support to Open Access institutional repository projects and related initiatives in universities and research centres worldwide. GrandIR aims to offer these repositories, either running or still in project, a whole series of support services for contributing to their development along their different implementation stages. GrandIR intends thus to become a technological partner to those projects interested in having a support service, as well as to the Open Access and repository community as a whole.
With these goals in mind, GrandIR will work along the following three main lines:

• Providing support for setting up and developing Open Access repositories, plus related services
• Organizing technical sessions for the repository and Open Access community
• Promoting Open Access-related initiatives, such as repositories and digital libraries, in developing countries in an international cooperation framework

Examples of work carried out so far along these three lines are available at GrandIR website, http://www.grandir.com/en/. To mention but a few:

- The Usage Module Campaign: an initiative for promoting availability of usage modules in every institutional repository, http://bit.ly/rfyIzu

- A series of OA repository-related technical sessions have already been organised – with some more in perspective, http://bit.ly/qsvyHK

- A number of ongoing projects to foster creation of Institutional Repositories (IRs) and promotion of Open Access in developing countries, http://bit.ly/kmoJuC

GrandIR aims also to show Open Access and an IR availability may effectively enhance web visibility of the research and academic output from smaller universities, therefore resulting in better worldwide institutional ranking rates for them.

Over the past decade, the role of open access publishing has been a topic of ongoing debate within the scientific community and Springer has always been proactive in embracing this new publishing model.

In 2004 we introduced Open Choice, a pioneering project which gives authors an open access option in established Springer journals. The acquisition of BioMed Central in 2008 reinforced the fact that we see open access publishing as a sustainable part of STM publishing. “We are seeing an increasing interest from authors and funders for open access publishing options and have responded to a need in the current market,” said Wim van der Stelt, EVP Business Development, Springer. “We are happy to serve our authors with the publishing options they want and are also pleased to supply universities and research institutions with the ability to use this content online, freely and conveniently.”

With the launch of SpringerOpen in 2010 we continued to broaden our reach into the scientific community. The SpringerOpen portfolio now consists of over fifty fully open access journals, covering all areas of science. Furthermore, in order to better serve the needs of both authors and institutions we collaborate with BioMed Central to extend their Open Access Membership Program, which allow institutions, societies and corporations to actively support open access. We are very pleased to be one of the sponsors of Open Access Week and will remain committed to establishing open access as a model for expanding access to top-quality scientific publications for researchers worldwide.