EDITORIAL
 Closing /Open Medicine/ Claire Kendall, James Maskalyk, Anita Palepu

Despite our passion for making high-quality medical information freely and widely accessible, we always knew it would come down to sustainability. This is our final editorial in /Open Medicine/. It has been an inspiring journey for all who have been involved in the journal?s inception, launch, and day-to-day operations. Around the idea that there is a need for unbiased, publicly accessible platforms for the dissemination of medical research and discussion, a lively community gathered. There were great debates, wonderful authors and articles, excitement and enthusiasm for what was possible, and freedom from the constraints of paper and for-profit ownership. We are closing /Open Medicine/ knowing that we have made a meaningful contribution to something bigger than ourselves, and that our efforts have helped to change the landscape of medical publishing. /Open Medicine/ was born from our refusal to stand behind blatant interference with editorial independence in biomedical publishing.^1 <http://www.openmedicine.ca/article/viewArticle/654/572#ref1>, ^2 <http://www.openmedicine.ca/article/viewArticle/654/572#ref2> Such interference is a recurring theme in medical publishing, a fact hinging on the vested interests of medical journal publishers (typically, medical associations and societies, who sometimes find themselves at odds with outspoken editors) and of their advertisers (mainly, pharmaceutical and medical device companies). Our desire to free ourselves from this model launched us quickly and passionately into the emerging and evolving world of open access.^1 <http://www.openmedicine.ca/article/viewArticle/654/572#ref1> Our presence caused other journals to change, to become more open, and to evolve with the times. Although there is some debate about whether these efforts are open enough (/Open Medicine/ is both open access and open source, for instance), they have helped to make information access more equitable. While inspiring, the process was also chronically frustrating. Despite everyone?s best intentions, it was challenging for a small team to keep stoking the interest and engagement of the general academic community, and it was difficult to recruit members to our editorial board and board of directors who could provide the kind of hands-on involvement that our small but ambitious operation required. Academic medicine has been slow to recognize the importance of stepping out of the comfort zone of traditional publishing: unfortunately, the benefits of disseminating information freely still takes second place to the allure of publishing in a prestigious forum, however difficult that forum may be for readers to access. By the end, despite continual efforts to deepen our bench strength, there were few stalwart supporters. Perhaps our mistake was to focus our recruitment efforts too much on those who were well established in their careers, rather than on up-and-coming authors and editors, who might have been more likely to embrace new possibilities. The work was also exacting. Launching and running a medical journal is more work than it might seem.^3 <http://www.openmedicine.ca/article/viewArticle/654/572#ref3> Based on our previous experiences, we thought we might need operational funding of about $3 million dollars per year. Ultimately, by dint of optimism and volunteerism, we were able to run the journal and publish articles for a tiny fraction of that. We built upon the Public Knowledge Project?s Open Journal System, the open source platform whose development was led by our friend and publisher John Willinsky, and which now hosts over 7000 open access journals in 105 countries.^4 <http://www.openmedicine.ca/article/viewArticle/654/572#ref4> We were also accepted for indexing in PubMed after three short years; this was no small achievement.^5 <http://www.openmedicine.ca/article/viewArticle/654/572#ref5> We had immense support from Canadian research libraries, thanks to their own commitment to making knowledge freely available and their frustration with ever-escalating fees for bundled journal subscriptions. We also had contributions from our own colleagues and institutions to build on in our early years. Finally, thousands of volunteer hours were generously given to journal logistics, technical support, and web design, not to mention what accrued from the editorial and communications expertise of team members and the contributions of our valued bank of peer reviewers. The publishing landscape we are leaving is very different from the one we entered seven years ago. The Canadian Institutes of Health Research have adopted, and now strengthened, an open access policy for their publicly funded research and are collaborating with the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada to develop a tri-council policy that will broaden and further reinforce these requirements. Many Canadian universities now have institutional repositories to help their faculty meet these open access requirements, as well as author funds to help authors pay publication charges that allow their work to be freely (if not openly) available. Most researchers now recognize that high-quality open access publications require the same level of peer review and editorial input as traditional journals. etc.

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