Cite this article: Bone Joint Open 2020;1-1:1–2.
It is a great privilege to be able to introduce you to the first edition of Bone & Joint Open, the newest journal of The British Editorial Society of Bone & Joint Surgery. Bone & Joint Open has been in gestation for a number of years as we considered the best way to meet the evolving needs of our researchers, our authors, of research funders, and of the trauma and orthopaedic community. It further broadens the scope and offering of the Bone & Joint family beyond the outstanding heritage and continued excellence of The Bone & Joint Journal.
As our scope has increased, we have been proud to see Bone & Joint Research flourish as a repository for basic orthopaedic research, and have been pleased with the popularity of the outstanding summaries and distillation of evidence that are seen in Bone & Joint 360.
Bone & Joint Open will be a gold open access journal, aimed at the trauma and orthopaedic community worldwide, and essentially to the same audience that enjoys reading The Bone & Joint Journal and benefits greatly from it. It will have the same double blind peer review process and to the same high standards as The Bone & Joint Journal, and will be published by the same in-house team with similar rigour. This will ensure rapid open publication in order to meet the needs of our community.
Open access publishing has gained great momentum and is indeed a requirement from some funding bodies and research institutions. An article published in open access journals, such as Bone & Joint Open, will be freely accessible to the public and will not sit behind a paywall. While we have run a hybrid model in The Bone & Joint Journal for a number of years, and will continue to do so, there is an increasing need to have a purely open access journal within our armamentarium.
In order to publish in Bone & Joint Open, authors will submit their paper in the standard fashion. There will, however, be an article processing charge of £750/$900/€815, which will facilitate publication on an open platform. This fee is covered by many charities or large grants, and by many institutions.
Having launched Bone & Joint Research nine years ago, we already have a working model which the Bone & Joint team will now be able to run in Bone & Joint Open, and publish an increasing array of trauma and orthopaedic research in an open setting. This will make material easily accessible. While I will serve as Editor in Chief for Bone & Joint Open, we will soon expand the editorial team as activity increases.
The availability and accessibility of Bone & Joint Open will not compromise the content of The Bone & Joint Journal, which will still include the best peer reviewed literature (including some open access papers). Our focus remains on producing the highest quality trauma and orthopaedic material with a strong peer review process at the heart of it. Bone & Joint Open will allow us to increase our capacity to publish those papers that cannot make it into the limited space available in The Bone & Joint Journal. Indeed, many such papers will already have been through the peer review process at The Bone & Joint Journal. Others will of course be submitted directly.
We believe that by increasing the outstanding offering that the Bone & Joint family makes to its readers and to the orthopaedic community, Bone & Joint Open will meet the needs of some of our authors, of some funding institutions, and of many of our readers. Therefore, authors are encouraged to submit to Bone & Joint Open directly at https://mc04.manuscriptcentral.com/bjopen.
We look forward to seeing Bone & Joint Open expand, and sharing its outputs and success with you over the next few months and years. Ultimately, the key goal is to be able to share clinically-relevant information of the highest quality with the orthopaedic community worldwide, and to help our readers and their patients. We look forward to your feedback.
