The OpenPhysio-Journal was launched in 2018 with the generous support of Physiopedia. In recent years we have concentrated on building the website's technical infrastructure and providing excellent service to readers and authors.
I thought it would be time to post another update on the progress we have made in developing this niche journal in physical therapy education, especially over the last year or so. You may not know, but OpenPhysio is one of the few journals that focuses on physiotherapy education is openly accessible and innovates in various areas of peer review. It's completely free for writers and readers, too.
Earlier this year, we learned that our application to be included in the Directory of Open Access Journal (DOAJ) was successful, and you can see our DOAJ entry here. This is the first index that we applied to and that will be followed up with others (e.g. PubMed) as we start refining our processes and systems. Inclusion in the DOAJ will hopefully lead to an increase in the discovery of organic articles, which is of great importance to both authors and readers. We will also complete the technical work required for inclusion in the Google Scholar database (amazingly, this does not happen automatically) before moving on to more established directories.
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A new milestone – DOI generation
Another big milestone is that we can now generate DOIs which we were unable to do until recently. DOIs are widely used to identify academic, professional, and regulatory information, including research data, articles, records, and metadata. DOIs are therefore very important for citation and referencing purposes, as they summarize a lot of information about a digital creation in a unique identifier.
While journals can publish articles without DOIs, creates a certain level of trust for authors as it sends a message to readers and authors stating that our articles will always have this unique point of reference. We are therefore very pleased that we are now able to generate our own DOIs and that we are busy retrofitting all of our accepted articles with DOIs. Once that's done we will go through the peer reviews that will be published alongside the articles. This means that all OpenPhysio peer reviews are also assigned these unique identifiers.
Linked to this is the concept of permanent storage. Physiopedia is currently publishing the OpenPhysio journal which also provides technical support including hosting the website and the PDF versions of our articles. This means that all magazine articles will have a permanent home on the internet as long as Physiopedia exists. In the very unlikely event that Physiopedia is no longer available, we have also looked into alternative long-term digital archiving solutions that offer our items a more or less permanent digital home.
As part of the subsequent update of articles with DOIs, we will add more explicit license information to both the PDF and the web version of articles. All OpenPhysio items are automatically licensed with the CC BY 4.0 copyright license. This means that anyone can use the articles for any purpose as long as they are associated with the original creator. However, unlike most other journals, OpenPhysio does not require authors to sign their intellectual property in the journal . This means they retain the right to host their articles anywhere, share them with others, and do whatever they want with them.
Although this license is automatically assigned to every OpenPhysio article and we always had this on the Journal website, we did not add it to the PDF versions of the publications. As we move forward, we'll add these licenses to the articles so that it's clear what authors (and everyone else) can do with the articles. The short version is: You can do anything you want as long as you honor the original author.
A New Announcement – The OpenPhysio Podcast
Finally, we set up the technical infrastructure to publish podcasts via the journal. These will be brief, informal conversations with a few authors, and the episodes will be available on the magazine's website as well as on any podcast client . We have already recorded our first conversation with James McLoughlin and we will hopefully publish it in the next few weeks. And we have a few more episodes in the series.
If you would like to contribute to the development of the magazine, please contact me at [email protected] . We are always looking for new peer reviewers. If you have never peer reviewed but would like to develop your skills in this area, please contact us. OpenPhysio is a development journal. This means that we will match you with an experienced examiner to help you take your first exam. And as always, you should consider submitting any work you've done in the field of physical therapy education as we accept articles in a variety of formats.
With the dumpster fire in 2020, I think the magazine has seen tremendous growth and I am very excited to see what 2021 will bring.
