Open access orthodontics

The traditional method for scientists to disseminate the results of their research is through timely publication in peer-reviewed scholarly journals. Collectively, these articles form an evolving body of literature within any particular subject area and provide the definitive evidence base for anybody interested in the field.

As with many things in modern life, the technological advances afforded by the internet have had a significant effect on this model. Just over a decade ago, access to academic journals was achieved in two main ways: either you took out a personal subscription to a particular journal, which would then fall through your letterbox every month or so; or you visited a subscribing library to either read or photocopy your article of interest. To find your article, you would search through Index Medicus (remember that?) and then hunt through shelves of dusty bound journals. More recently, electronic access has become the favoured model, both for searching and reading journal content, and this offers significant advantages for all concerned. For the journal publisher, papers can be published more rapidly, either in advance of or in addition to those in print form, which increases both the quantity and topicality of journal content. For the reader, these articles can be searched for, viewed, downloaded and printed without the inconvenience of having to visit the university library. For the author, an electronic format speeds up the submission and refereeing process and allows more space, facilitating the deposition of supplementary data, which can provide a useful basic resource for other researchers and significantly aid meta analysis. However, this form of electronic publishing still works around a subscription model, and without a personal or institutional subscription access will not be available to some interested readers and therein lies the problem. When the fundamental basis of science is to advance knowledge, restricting access to this knowledge is a contradiction. In addition, in many cases this science has been publically funded and should therefore be available to all.

In response to these issues of accessibility, the internet has facilitated another change in scientific publishing, the concept of ‘open access’ (OA) journals.1 In the ‘gold’ OA model, research is still peer reviewed in the traditional way, but once accepted it is published in an online journal and anybody with internet access can read and download the article. Remuneration for the publisher comes not from the reader, but from other sources, usually the author. A significant number of virtual OA journals now exist, particularly within the Biomed Central (BMC) and Public Library of Science (PLOS) stables. Many of these journal titles operate along traditional lines, publishing peer reviewed articles considered to have significant impact within the field. Others have moved away from subject specialization and perceived impact as a criterion for acceptance or rejection. PLOS ONE is the world’s largest peer-review journal, publishing over 23,000 articles in 2012. This journal uses peer review to ensure that experiments and data analysis have been conducted rigorously, but leaves it to the scientific community to ascertain importance, through debate and comment after publication. Although this model has been criticized, there is evidence that this form of publishing is able to maintain conventional impact.2

However, in many fields of science, long-established society and subscription journals still dominate, and a variation of this model is called ‘green’ OA, where articles are submitted to a public or university repository, for example PubMed Central, and made freely available after an embargo period of six to twelve months. Regardless of the precise mechanism, OA publishing is here to stay, and many charitable and government funding agencies on both sides of the Atlantic now insist that the results of work funded by them should be published in an OA format.1 Indeed, as of April 2013, all peer-reviewed published research articles and conference proceedings funded by Research Councils UK must be OA.3

The concept of OA has not been lost on the Journal of Orthodontics, which is the Journal of the British Orthodontic Society. As a charitable body, a principal aim of the society is to advance the science of orthodontics. I am therefore delighted to report that the Society has taken the decision to fund OA publication of up to four randomized controlled trials (RCTs) per year in the Journal, chosen at the discretion of the editorial board. This will make the findings of these reports available to all, further enhance a reputation that the Journal already has for publishing high quality RCTs3 and hopefully, encourage the continued submission of these types of investigation to the Journal. In addition, we will also be publishing all accepted articles online in advance of print, which will speed up access to the latest research. Appropriately enough, our OA initiative begins in this issue of the Journal, which focuses on several aspects of clinical research design and application. The RCT that has been chosen was carried out in Chesterfield and Sheffield by Henry Wong, Jill Collins, Dave Tinsley, Jonathan Sandler and Philip Benson.5 This investigation goes some way toward answering a question that is of relevance to all practising orthodontists: whether different bracket-ligature combinations influence the rate of space closure. This is a robust and well conducted trial and I encourage you to read it. However, I won’t spoil it for you by divulging the results here. Read on and enjoy!