JMIR is now the number 2 ranked journal (by impact factor) in the ISI health informatics category, and #6 in the health services category. It was launched in 1998 with the first issue published in 1999 – well before BMC, PLoS, and Open Medicine started their businesses. We have been a pioneer in “grass-roots” OA publishing (with no large publisher involved), experimenting with and successfully implementing a hybrid business model (a combination of author-fees and a membership scheme which gives members value-added services such as PDF files). We have developed open source software to facilitate the publishing process (e.g. Word-to-XML conversion scripts – work that journals like Open Medicine now benefits from), and we are helping other journals to make transitions from a subscription-based to an open access model. We also developed tools like WebCite (http://www.webcitation.org) which is now used by hundreds of journals, including BioMed Central journals. JMIR has also run experiments with open peer-review (and is conducting another randomized trial at the moment). Finally, we have been doing seminal work on the impact of open access and hold a current CIHR grant to explore the relation between OA and knowledge translation.

It is funny (and slightly bothering) to see an Open Medicine board meeting right next door revisiting and discussing these issues which we have been working on for many years. But I assume they are still at the stage where self-promotion and branding is a top priority over seeking collaborations with those who have been doing this for many years.

Gunther Eysenbach
Senior Scientist, e-publishing and open access group at the Centre for Global eHealth Innovation
Publisher & Editor, JMIR