2007-01-12
Journal of Rehabilitation Medicine is a non-profit international journal owned by the Foundation for Rehabilitation Information. Until now, we have consulted a publishing company, Taylor & Francis, to take care of all publishing matters. In preparation for the transition towards electronic and open access publication, the Society has chosen to handle the entire procedure within the editorial office. Thus, from 2007 and onwards we will no longer have a commercial publisher.
This change of policy by Journal of Rehabilitation Medicine is in line with the worldwide trend of attempting to provide greater access to the results of scientific research, as shown by the Berlin declaration in 2003, and perhaps best expressed in the new rules for NIH and Wellcome Trust grant holders. For instance, the Wellcome Trust, the world's biggest research charity now demands that the final manuscripts of all authors' research papers are deposited in PubMed Central - the free-to-access life sciences repository, developed by the National Library of Medicine. Papers deposited in this repository must be made freely accessible no later than 6 months after publication. Furthermore, many universities have proposed that recipients of their research grants should place a copy of the published journal articles in an e-print repository on university or subject-based websites. This is in line with the intentions of Journal of Rehabilitation Medicine and in this way, the research papers will be given greater potential audiences - anyone with Internet access will be able to read them without restriction. By adhering to these regulations, we believe we will also further increase the impact of the research published in our journal.