The wonderful aspects of Open Access publishing ‐ and the unfortunate dark side

Innovative biomedical research must be ethical, methodologically sound, understandable, and easily accessible. The responsibility for assuring the fulfilment of these fundamentals must be anchored amongst the publisher, the editors and referees, and the authors and investigators. The ambition of Clinical and Experimental Dental Research is to provide publication that meets these fundamentals. The premises should be the best from the perspective of the reputation of the publisher, the exceptional quality of the associate editors, and the implementation of the open access (OA) concept. Wiley is an academic publisher with greater than 200 years of experience. Their scientific, technical, medical, and scholarly divisions publish more than 1,500 peer-reviewed print or online journals. Amongst these are many of the most prestigious scientific journals in dentistry and orofacial medicine. We expect to count Clinical and Experimental Dental Research as one of them within the next five years. The charge of Clinical and Experimental Dental Research is to publish clinical, diagnostic, and experimental work of high scientific quality and originality within all disciplines and fields of dentistry and orofacial medicine. The ambition can only be possible with the assembly of competent editors that assure excellence of the peer-review process. It is with pride we can boast a consortium of twenty-five associate editors garnering exceptional qualities from the perspective of scientific merit and scholarly recognition. These esteemed colleagues represent different countries, continents and a broad expertise. It may be noted that the editors of Clinical and Experimental Dental Research combined have published more than 2000 scientific reports listed on Pubmed. The core concept of OA is that the authors pay a publication charge for the publication of their article so the readers can have unrestricted online access to their peer-reviewed research report instead of having to subscribe to the journal. Even though the notion of OA has existed for decades, the continuous advances in information technology creates constantly new opportunities to disseminate research findings. An illustrative example is the world’s largest database of health literature managed by the United States National Library of Medicine, MEDLINE. The database was originally only accessible for a fee using the MEDLARS software run on a mainframe computer through a university library terminal. In 1997, access to the full database suddenly became free through the Pubmed portal on internet, about the same time as a new generation of internet browsers emerged. Further developments in information technology prompted academicians and scholars to get together about a decade ago to establish the Budapest OA initiative (Budapest, 2012). The advances in computing prompted also the World Health Organization in partnership with six major publishers to launch a marvelous initiative named the HINARI Access to Research in Health Program (Hinari, 2012). The ambition was to facilitate or enable developing countries to access collections of biomedical and health literature. The statement of intent reflects the aim: "Recognizing that biomedical research is essential to improving the health of the developing world, and that access to primary biomedical information is essential to research, a new effort is being undertaken to open access to the primary biomedical literature for developing country researchers and academia". The continuous advances in information technology allowed major publishers to create digital versions of printed journals, and they supplied codes for online access to the institutions in the countries that qualified for HINARI. At that time, I Correspondence Institute of Clinical Dentistry, Faculty of Health of Health Sciences UiT The Arctic University of Norway Tromso, Norway E-mail: asbjorn.jokstad@uit.no EDITORIAL