2014 proved to be a successful and fruitful year for BMJ Open. We received over 2500 submissions, compared to just over 2000 in 2013. We published over 1100 papers.
BMJ Open has always welcomed research article and protocol submissions, and in 2014, we expanded our scope to include cohort profiles.
In mid year, Thomson Reuters calculated our second impact factor (IF), ‘2.063,’ which was an increase on our 2013 IF (1.583). BMJ Open was also selected to be indexed in MedLine. We are now included in every major database (which also includes Web of Science, PubMed amongst others.)
Last year, you may remember us mentioning that we introduced our institutional memberships, which aim to ease the administrative burden around organising payment of article publishing charges (APCs) as well as providing authors with discounts. Since 2013, the number of institutions who now hold a membership with us has increased. There are now 25 institutions that are a part of our Open Access Membership scheme.
Despite memberships, we understand that some authors still do not have access to funds. We aim to support where we can, and this year we waived over £100k in charges.
Press coverage of BMJ Open articles was considerable, in particular around the following papers ‘The prescribing of antipsychotics in UK primary care‘ and ‘Habitual alcohol consumption associated with reduced semen quality and changes in reproductive hormones’. We have increased the number of video abstracts to help promote papers that have been press released.
We also published the first trial prompted by the Restoring Invisible and Abandoned Trials (RIAT) initiative. The initiative was previously announced by editors of The BMJ and PLOS Medicine as a way to complete and correct the scientific record, so that doctors and patients have access to accurate information to make decisions about treatments.
It was a busy year for us, but we would like to take the opportunity to thank our reviewers and authors and we look forward to working with you again.