Introduction. The development of the World Wide Web (WWW) has made it possible of small groups of colleagues or even single individuals to create peer-reviewed scholarly journals. This paper discusses the development of Medical Education Online (MEO) an open access peer-reviewed journal in health professional education.
Description.MEO was first published in April 1996 partly as an experiment and partly out of frustration with existing options for publishing in health professional education. The journal a forum for disseminating information on educating physicians and other health professionals and contains a variety of material including a peer-reviewed journal. The case study discusses the process of establishing the journal, the development of the journal over time, its struggle coping with an increasing number of submissions, review procedures, journal management software, indexing and archiving issues, journal policies, and access statistics.
Conclusions. MEO is one of many examples of successful small open access journals that operate largely on volunteer effort and are providing a useful niche in scholarly publishing.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 1/19/2007 10:11:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
